Academic Life
While his reputation and career seem to traverse a diverse group of interests and institutions, there is at the same time a “continuity shot” to follow throughout in his commitment to psychoanalysis and problems of mourning.
“Rickels’ work, it is worth pointing out, is reminiscent of Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, both in its command of the contributions of Freud’s early followers to classical psychoanalysis and in its desire to challenge literary studies with a mode of reading that exceeds the boundaries of text-immanent criticism. Rickels is unlike Bloom, however, in his insistence that the psychoanalysis of literature must go beyond the notions of patricidal writing that followed a generation of psychoanalysts’ reduction of Freud’s thought to the Oedipal scenario” (Modern Language Notes 112, 1997: 487).
Rickels’s research has been supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Austrian Government, the Center for German and European Studies (UC Berkeley), the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center (UC Santa Barbara), and the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin, among other institutions, agencies, and offices. At New York University he presented the 2007 Otto and Ilse Mainzer Lecture and, in 2011, en route to his new position in Germany, the Undergraduate Major’s Choice Lecture of the Comparative Literature Department.
Read more about this topic: Laurence A. Rickels
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