Lennard J. Davis – författare

We live in an age of obsession. Not only are we hopelessly devoted to our work, strangely addicted to our favorite television shows, and desperately impassioned about our cars, we admire obsession in others: we demand that lovers be infatuated with one another in films, we respond to the passion of single-minded musicians, we cheer on driven athletes. To be obsessive is to be American; to be obsessive is to be modern.

But obsession is not only a phenomenon of modern existence: it is a medical category—both a pathology and a goal. Behind this paradox lies a fascinating history, which Lennard J. Davis tells in Obsession. Beginning with the roots of the disease in demonic possession and its secular successors, Davis traces the evolution of obsessive behavior from a social and religious fact of life into a medical and psychiatric problem. From obsessive aspects of professional specialization to obsessive compulsive disorder and nymphomania, no variety of obsession eludes Davis’s graceful analysis.

The fifth edition of The Disability Studies Reader addresses the post-identity theoretical landscape by emphasizing questions of interdependency and independence, the human-animal relationship, and issues around the construction or materiality of gender, the body, and sexuality. Selections explore the underlying biases of medical and scientific experiments and explode the binary of the sound and the diseased mind. The collection addresses physical disabilities, but as always investigates issues around pain, mental disability, and invisible disabilities as well. Featuring a new generation of scholars who are dealing with the most current issues, the fifth edition continues the Reader’s tradition of remaining timely, urgent, and critical.

The fifth edition of The Disability Studies Reader addresses the post-identity theoretical landscape by emphasizing questions of interdependency and independence, the human-animal relationship, and issues around the construction or materiality of gender, the body, and sexuality. Selections explore the underlying biases of medical and scientific experiments and explode the binary of the sound and the diseased mind. The collection addresses physical disabilities, but as always investigates issues around pain, mental disability, and invisible disabilities as well. Featuring a new generation of scholars who are dealing with the most current issues, the fifth edition continues the Reader’s tradition of remaining timely, urgent, and critical.

"By making friends with signs", Lennard Davis argues, "we are weakening the bond that anchors us to the social world, the world of action, and binding ourselves to the ideological." For the reader, this power of the novel needs to be resisted. But there is a double resistance at work: the novel is also a defensive structure positioning us against alienation and loneliness: the dehumanising symptoms of modern life.

While discussions surrounding ideology in novels traditionally concentrate on thematics, in this study – first published in 1987 - Davis approaches the subject through such structural features as location, character, dialogue and plot. Drawing on a wide range of novels from the seventeenth century to the present day, and on psychoanalysis as well as philosophy, Resisting Novels explores how fiction works subliminally to resist change and to detach the reader from the world of lived experience. This controversial critique will engage students and academics with a particular interest in literary theory.

"By making friends with signs", Lennard Davis argues, "we are weakening the bond that anchors us to the social world, the world of action, and binding ourselves to the ideological." For the reader, this power of the novel needs to be resisted. But there is a double resistance at work: the novel is also a defensive structure positioning us against alienation and loneliness: the dehumanising symptoms of modern life.

While discussions surrounding ideology in novels traditionally concentrate on thematics, in this study – first published in 1987 - Davis approaches the subject through such structural features as location, character, dialogue and plot. Drawing on a wide range of novels from the seventeenth century to the present day, and on psychoanalysis as well as philosophy, Resisting Novels explores how fiction works subliminally to resist change and to detach the reader from the world of lived experience. This controversial critique will engage students and academics with a particular interest in literary theory.