In Venedikt Yerofeev’s Moscow–Petushki the character Venichka, a version of the author, takes an increasingly surreal train ride towards Petushki, a town at the end of a Moscow line which he believes to be like paradise. Unlike other drinker novels, where the committed central drinker’s behaviour is regarded as outside social norms, Venichka is surrounded by like-minded Russian souls who also drink continuously. One of the central conceits of the novel explored in this chapter is thus the role of Venichka as a Russian Everyman who is simultaneously alienated from the state, and paradoxically also from the people – drinking is his chosen vocation rather than a form of dulling self-medication. Venichka’s alienation is manifest in his ongoing argument with God, Russia, and fate. The chapter assesses how the novel refuses to privilege rationality, philosophy, or empiricism in its determination to fully exist in a country/world which lacks any kind of coherence, and offers a comparison between this novel and Exley’s A Fan’s Notes in their treatment of the individual, drink, and the nation state.

This chapter charts how Sigmund Freud considered memory, as one of the processes working through the subject. In Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis, about the 'Rat Man', Freud writes a modernist novella: the portrait of a young man. As the analysis proceeds, so 'transference' happens: the Rat Man dumps on to Freud the characteristics of his dead father, giving his fears an objective force. Freud thinks of the Rat Man's obsessions taking the form of 'distortion by omission or ellipsis', and in doing so draws attention to the point that psychoanalysis works by observation of language, that is its interest, and how it connects with literature. Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology, which influenced all his work, especially The Interpretation of Dreams, and Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Both Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida commented on the Project.

This chapter constructs a relationship between the autobiographical writing of queer lesbian Chicana Gloria Anzaldúa and queer southern writer Dorothy Allison, two queer feminist authors who have not been read alongside each other, despite their work having much in common. Reading these two authors together allows us to begin the recovery of an as-yet unwritten history of radical queer feminism in the twentieth century, mapping linked networks of influence that suggest a burgeoning strand of intersectional feminism that has not yet been examined in existing literary histories of the movement. More broadly, by exposing tangible connections between the experiences of civic marginalisation faced by Chicana and ‘white trash’ communities, this chapter reads Anzaldúa and Allison as having separately but equally theorised feminist spaces and communities for a queered citizenship.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores key critical debates in humanities in recent times in the context of the legitimation crisis widely felt to be facing academic institutions, using Jacques Derrida's idea of leverage in the university as a critical point of departure. It discusses the deconstructive studies of the university in detail and examines aspects of the university's intellectual traditions and genealogy. The book also discusses the problematical doubleness of economics as undecidably both inside and outside contemporary cultural theory. Through a close reading of Kant's The Conflict of the Faculties, Derrida suggests that Kant attempts to contain and control the violently disruptive and divisive energies of this intractable crisis by insisting on its nature as mere 'conflict' as opposed to out-and-out 'war'.

This short concluding chapter brings together the analysis of Donne’s Holy Sonnets and Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece in the context of poetry and drama, the soliloquy and the soul. The correlative of the self-division into body and soul is the communicative situation of the soliloquy. The speakers in both texts become observers of what is going on within them, which creates distances from as well as involvement with what is being witnessed. The soul becomes a stage and it appears on the stage of the theatre. Thus, the self begins to establish and define itself in a complex interplay of interiority and theatrical exposure both in poetry and the theatre. It is the soul that provides the link between self and (literary) self-expression, and the soliloquy provides a communicative mode that allowed writers to form this self-expression.

The play the First Folio styles The third Part of Henry the Sixt generated the earliest surviving notice of William Shakespeare in performance, a review by Robert Greene, writing in A Groats-worth of Witte. Greene's 'Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hide' parodies a line that comes four scenes into 3 Henry VI, at the death of Richard, Duke of York. Greene crafts his analogy to associate the tiger with the crow, the woman with the player, a move that rhetorically slides the woman's monstrous violation of gender off on to the player, troping other violence done upon the order of things. Greene's metaphors degrade Shakespeare to a woman and cast him as an aspiring 'upstart', a 'wannabe' university man. Greene testifies to the power of the theatrical moment that etched upon his unwilling spectatorship and memory, to the extent even of inserting itself into his own writerly performance space.

This chapter shows disorientation and leverage in the university by exploring the problematic doubleness of economics as indeterminately both inside and outside contemporary cultural theory. It presents the question of the interdisciplinary nature of cultural analysis, particularly in relation to the complex interchange between the economy of criticism, and the location and deployment of the field of economics itself within the intellectual and discursive economy. To account for the problematic yet productive interaction between cultural criticism's own economy and the field of economics, the chapter presents the question of gift-exchange that has so interested theorists across the various disciplines of anthropology, sociology, economics, semiotics and philosophy. The chapter focuses specifically on the implications for cultural criticism of the close relationship between the concept of the gift and that of culture itself arising from Jacques Derrida's discussion.

This part focuses on prescriptive rather than descriptive treatments of history, using the neoclassical ideal of formal historical narrative as a foil for genres like satire and secret history. Like all literary works, Roger North's and John Oldmixon's narratives demonstrate a range of potential literary influences. But both the Examen and the Stuart history provide for a relatively uncomplicated analysis in that each of them can be associated very clearly with a particular subgenre of historical literature.

This chapter identifies A. L. Kennedy’s novel Paradise as having many of the elements of the Existential-drinker text – a protagonist, Hannah Luckraft, who commits to drinking, coupled with questions around how to exist in an essentially meaningless universe – yet also shows signs of surrendering this understanding to a hedonism that eventually becomes indistinguishable from complete oblivion. A distinctive feature of the novel is that it presents the reader with two drinkers who are in love with each other and for large portions of the novel remain committed to their drinking. Another feature of the novel is its paralleling of events with the Stations of the Cross and associated meanings, usually treated in ironic fashion. Throughout the novel, notwithstanding the potential for love and religion to provide purposefulness for Hannah, this is another novel which ultimately eschews any meaning-making framework.