Abstract

The dissertation deals with the possibility of historicizing the fundamental connection between narrative and desire. Using Lacanian psychoanalysis both as a methodological tool and an object of study--along with other post-modern theories of culture--I have provided a topography of the theoretical ramifications of desire and narrative. I have then outlined a theory of historicized narrative desire which looks at both notions in terms of how they modify and inform different cultural products. ;My premise is that, as a linear form, narrative is at the same time the space where desire gets expressed and the structure which determines the conditions of our act of desiring. The tendency on the part of desire to be mediated by temporal structures betrays an imaginary attempt to evade the "reality" of the "event" which has caused it in the first place. This imaginary evasion of the "real story" implies a lifting of desire from the realm of contingency and change. It implies an act of dehistoricization. I have argued that it is this attempt in its negative form which makes possible any account or perception of the historical contingency of desire as it is expressed in cultural forms and discourses. In other words, when the subject uses narrative or fantasy to evade the reality of her desire, she involuntarily betrays what she wants to evade--she makes possible the historicization of her own desire. Historicization is therefore the act whereby the analysand and by extension the reader relates desire to its "real" event, to its "true" story. ;The historicization of narrative desire is important for three reasons: it explains how cultural artifacts relate to different desires; it deconstructs the premises of the metaphysical understanding of desire that has dominated classical forms of discourse; it lays the ground for a theory and a politics of desire that takes into consideration variables like race, gender, class and "nation," which I try to outline with specific reference to a set of modernist, colonial and "feminine" texts