Review by Choice Review
Bouson's study, the first sustained application of the thought of psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut (1913-1981) to literary models, reflects a careful reading of Kohut's narcissistic "psychology of the self" (an empathic focus on Tragic Man and Woman), and of recent reader-response theory. The result is rich, stimulating, but uneven. Bouson succeeds nicely in her discussions of protagonists from Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, Conrad's Secret Sharer and Heart of Darkness (a particularly good chapter), Mann's Death in Venice, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, and Atwood's Lady Oracle (also very good). In other chapters she falters. Her treatment of Kafka's Metamorphosis is perceptive but too brief, and her charge of "childlike dependency and arrested development" against the protagonist of Bellow's Seize the Day (because he changes his name to a less ethnic one) is debatable at best. Her selection of Lessing's The Summer Before the Dark is oddly perverse; arguably one of Lessing's weakest novels, Summer may fit Bouson's thesis but the chapter contributes little to our understanding of Lessing. Bouson is most provocative and seminal in documenting Kohut's importance to literary analysis; since both psychoanalysis and literary criticism are involved in the "search for the self and for the nuclear essence of humanness," it is empathy--"our relationship to the characters we encounter"--that draws us to fiction. Recommended primarily for advanced-level students. -P. Schlueter, Warren County Community College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
