The Politics of the Dreamscape

This book traces the intersection of dreams and power in order to analyze the complex ways representations of dreams and paradigms of dream interpretation reinforce and challenge authoritarian, hierarchical structures. The book puts forward the concept of the dreamscape as a pre-representational space that contains anarchistic attributes, including its instability or chaotic nature and the lack of a stable or core selfhood and identity in its subjects. The book situates this concept of the dreamscape through an analysis of the Daoist notions of the transformation of things and hundun (chaos) and the biblical concept of tehom (the deep). Using this conceptual framework, this book analyzes paradigmatic moments of dream interpretation along a spectrum from radical, anarchist assertions of the primal dreamscape to authoritarian dream-texts that seek to reify identity, define and establish hierarchy, and support coercive relationships between unequal subjects. The book's key figures include William Blake, Robert Frost, Jacob and Joseph from Genesis, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Jean Rhys, Franz Kafka, and the neurobiologist J. Allan Hobson

Details the unique concept of the "dreamscape" as a pre-representational space with anarchistic attributes Explores new readings of the politics of key modernist figures like Jean Rhys and Franz Kafka through analysis of the role of dreams in their work Suggests a new understanding of the biblical relationship of Jacob and Joseph through a close reading of the function of dreams in the Book of Genesis

Auteur

Seth Rogoff is a novelist and a scholar of literary and cultural analysis. He is the author of the novels *First, the Raven: a Preface (2017) *and Thin Rising Vapors (2018). He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam's Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), The Netherlands, and is currently a lecturer in history and English at the University of Southern Maine, USA, and a member of the MFA faculty at Maine College of Art.

Contenu

1.Introduction.- 2.Dreams and Power.- 3.Dreams and Power between Jacob and Joseph, a Speculative Interpretation.- 4. Freud's Conquest of the Dreamscape.- 5.Dream-Texts Integrating and Disintegrating.- 6. Dreams and Power in Kafka's The Castle .-7. J. Allan Hobson's Dreamstage in Context.-8.Conclusion