This book is actually a reprint of a 1983 issue of the journal MLN on the topic of Lacan and Narration. Everything about it feels cheap, to the point where they even preserved the journal's page numbering rather than repaginating the text for the book format. My goodness.

For the most part, there is not a great deal of interest to today's scholar in this collection. The essays in here belong to the dry and formulaic tradition of 1980s literary criticism.

There are two exceptions to that rule, however. Juliet Flower MacCannell's chapter on Stendhal continues to have some resonance - it is interesting, too, that she states her ambition to write a postmodern reading of Stendhal that never eventuated. The work that she wrote instead was [b:The Regime of the Brother: After the Patriarchy|333266|The Regime of the Brother After the Patriarchy|Juliet Flower MacCannell|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348177493s/333266.jpg|323798], which includes a substantially reworked chapter on Stendhal.

The other exception is Shoshana Felman's chapter, which reappears almost exactly as it is here in her book [b:Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture|372680|Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture|Shoshana Felman|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1391656005s/372680.jpg|362614]. Felman has a habit of recycling her work in this way, but at least the piece is worth reading.

These two pieces sparkle in an otherwise drab collection of essays. ( )