Another exciting new title, Nathan Gorelick’s The Unwritten Elightenment: Literature between Ideology and the Unconscious (Northwestern University Press, 2024), is one of the most recent books we have indexed at Southwest Humanities. This book “traces the relations between literary criticism and psychoanalysis to their shared origins in the Enlightenment era’s novels and novelistic discourse,” thereby demonstrating “how modern concepts of literature and the unconscious were generated in response to these efforts and by an ethical concern for what the language of the Enlightenment excludes, represses, or struggles to erase.” Covering texts such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Rousseau’s Émile, Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom, Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, “The Unwritten Enlightenment makes clear that to criticize the Enlightenment’s deficiencies, ambiguities, and legacies of violence without regard for the unconscious fantasies that drive them risks reproducing the very patterns of thought, action, and imagination that the Enlightenment novel already unsettles.” Please take a look at the publisher’s website here for more information.
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