The starting point for this book, first published in 1992, is a question of rhetoric -- as much in the writings of feminism as in other writing about women. How do texts construct possibilities and limits, openings and impasses, which set the terms for the ways in which we think about what a woman is, or where women might be going, whether individually or collectively? Some possible answers, as well as more questions, are offered in this book which moves from Virginia Woolf to advertising and from Freud to Feminist theory.

The starting point for this book, first published in 1992, is a question of rhetoric a " as much in the writings of feminism as in other writing about women. How do texts construct possibilities and limits, openings and impasses, which set the terms for the ways in which we think about what a woman is, or where women might be going, whether individually or collectively?

Some possible answers, as well as more questions, are offered in this book which moves from Virginia Woolf to advertising and from Freud to Feminist theory.

The spectacular development of early consumer society in Britain, France and the United States had a profound impact on constructions of femininity and masculinity, and commercial and cultural values in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focusing on novels by Theodore Dreiser, George Gissing and Emile Zola, Just Looking, first published in 1985, addresses itself to a central paradox of the period: the perceived antithesis of the terms "commerce" and "culture" which emerged at a time which saw the actual drawing together of commercial and cultural practices.

Drawing on structural, psychoanalytic and Marxist-feminist theory, Rachel Bowlby retrieves a relatively neglected literary area for contemporary political and theoretical concerns, re-establishing the naturalist novel as a rich source for feminists, literary theorists and cultural historians.

Originally published in 1990, Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language explores the relationship between madness and the disruption of linguistic and structural norms in Virginia Woolf's modernist novels, opening new ground in Woolfian studies, as well as in psychoanalytic criticism. Focusing on Mrs Dalloway, The Waves, To the Lighthouse and Between the Acts, it investigates narrative strategies, showing that Woolf's writings question their own origins and connection with madness and suicide. By combining textual analysis with an original use of autobiographical material, the books cause us to reconsider the full complexity of the articulation between an author's life and work.

Originally published in 1990, Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language explores the relationship between madness and the disruption of linguistic and structural norms in Virginia Woolf's modernist novels, opening new ground in Woolfian studies, as well as in psychoanalytic criticism. Focusing on Mrs Dalloway, The Waves, To the Lighthouse and Between the Acts, it investigates narrative strategies, showing that Woolf's writings question their own origins and connection with madness and suicide. By combining textual analysis with an original use of autobiographical material, the books cause us to reconsider the full complexity of the articulation between an author's life and work.

Rachel Bowlby's anthology of articles conjures up the enormous richness and variety of recent work that returns to Woolf not so much for final answers as for insights into questions about writing, literary traditions and the differences of the sexes. The collection includes pieces by such well-known writers as Gillian Beer, Mary Jacobus, Peggy Kamuf and Catharine Stimpson. With a substantial Introduction, headnotes to each piece and full supporting material, this volume provides an ideal guide to Woolf and her place in modern literary and cultural studies.

The spectacular development of early consumer society in Britain, France and the United States had a profound impact on constructions of femininity and masculinity, and commercial and cultural values in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focusing on novels by Theodore Dreiser, George Gissing and Emile Zola, Just Looking, first published in 1985, addresses itself to a central paradox of the period: the perceived antithesis of the terms "commerce" and "culture" which emerged at a time which saw the actual drawing together of commercial and cultural practices. Drawing on structural, psychoanalytic and Marxist-feminist theory, Rachel Bowlby retrieves a relatively neglected literary area for contemporary political and theoretical concerns, re-establishing the naturalist novel as a rich source for feminists, literary theorists and cultural historians.

More than a hundred years ago, Freud made a new mythology by revising an old one: Oedipus, in Sophocles' tragedy the legendary perpetrator of shocking crimes, was an Everyman whose story of incest and parricide represented the fulfillment of universal and long forgotten childhood wishes. The Oedipus complex--child, mother, father--suited the nuclear families of the mid-twentieth century. But a century after the arrival of the psychoanalytic Oedipus, it might seem that modern lives are very much changed. Typical family formations and norms of sexual attachment are changing, while the conditions of sexual difference, both biologically and socially, have undergone far-reaching modifications. Today, it is possible to choose and live subjective stories that the first psychoanalytic patients could only dream of. Different troubles and enjoyments are speakable and unspeakable; different selves are rejected, discovered, or sought. Many kinds of hitherto unrepresented or unrepresentable identity have entered into the ordinary surrounding stories through which children and adults find their bearings in the world, while others have become obsolete. Biographical narratives that would previously have seemed unthinkable or incredible--"a likely story!"--have acquired the straightforward plausibility of a likely story.
This book takes two Freudian routes to think about some of the present entanglements of identity. First, it follows Freud in returning to Greek tragedies--Oedipus and others--which may now appear strikingly different in the light of today's issues of family and sexuality. And second, it re-examines Freud's own theories from these newer perspectives, drawing out different strands ofhis stories of how children develop and how people change (or don't). Both kinds of mythology, the classical and the theoretical, may now, in their difference, illuminate some of the forming stories of our contemporary world of serial families, multiple sexualities, and new reproductive technologies.

This book questions the book itself, archivization, machines for writing, and the mechanicity inherent in language, the media, and intellectuals. Derrida questions what takes place between the paper and the machine inscribing it. He examines what becomes of the archive when the world of paper is subsumed in new machines for virtualization, and whether there can be a virtual event or a virtual archive. Derrida continues his long-standing investigation of these issues, and ties them into the new themes that governed his teaching and thinking in the past few years: the secret, pardon, perjury, state sovereignty, hospitality, the university, animal rights, capital punishment, the question of what sort of mediatized world is replacing the print epoch, and the question of the "wholly other." Derrida is remarkable at making seemingly occasional pieces into part of a complexly interconnected trajectory of thought.

Consumer choice is regularly taken to be different from other kinds of choice - and not only different , but inferior and relatively trivial. So choosing to have a baby is unlike choosing a new car, and choosing to study a work of great literature is unlike 'merely' consuming a trash novel. In such comparisons, consumption is simple; and its supposed simplicity is necessary to establish the complexity and value of the other, 'higher' category of choice.
Yet if consumer choice were simple, the vast institutional field of 'consumer psychology' would never have developed. Shopping with Freud examines some of the dramatic ways in which the consumer subject was first imagined and analysed by this special area of psychology.
Once the simplicity of the consumerly is seen as a symptom rather than a given, new possibilities for thinking through ethical and other questions of choice emerge. The book looks at the diverse and unexpectedly overlapping ideas of choice and consumer choice deployed in consumer psychology and psychoanalysis, in arguments about the new reproductive technologies, and in arguments about literature and sexuality.

Rachel Bowlby's anthology of articles conjures up the enormous richness and variety of recent work that returns to Woolf not so much for final answers as for insights into questions about writing, literary traditions and the differences of the sexes. The collection includes pieces by such well-known writers as Gillian Beer, Mary Jacobus, Peggy Kamuf and Catharine Stimpson. With a substantial Introduction, headnotes to each piece and full supporting material, this volume provides an ideal guide to Woolf and her place in modern literary and cultural studies.

This book questions the book itself, archivization, machines for writing, and the mechanicity inherent in language, the media, and intellectuals. Derrida questions what takes place between the paper and the machine inscribing it. He examines what becomes of the archive when the world of paper is subsumed in new machines for virtualization, and whether there can be a virtual event or a virtual archive. Derrida continues his long-standing investigation of these issues, and ties them into the new themes that governed his teaching and thinking in the past few years: the secret, pardon, perjury, state sovereignty, hospitality, the university, animal rights, capital punishment, the question of what sort of mediatized world is replacing the print epoch, and the question of the "wholly other." Derrida is remarkable at making seemingly occasional pieces into part of a complexly interconnected trajectory of thought.

In the wake of the Dreyfus affair and the Shoah, many French intellectuals have maintained rich and complex relationships with Judaism, beyond as well as within the religious dimension. Whether they approach it via history, philosophy, biblical studies or sociology, or following a personal itinerary, many contemporary intellectuals are deeply involved in Jewish culture. Interviewed at length by Elisabeth Weber, this volume presents the meditations of seven well-known French thinkers on the special relations of their own intellectual pursuit to Judaism. As memory or as the place of "circumfession" (in Jacques Derrida's words), as the symbol of the "unrepresentable" (Jean-Francois Lyotard) or as the witness, according to Emmanuel Levinas, to a "biblical humanity," Judaism is continually engaged in renewing and displacing contemporary thought. The volume includes interviews with: Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Jacques Derrida, Rita Thalmann, Emmanuel Levinas, Leon Poliakov, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Luc Rosenzweig.

These two lectures by Jacques Derrida, "Foreigner Question" and "Step of Hospitality/No Hospitality," derive from a series of seminars on "hospitality" conducted by Derrida in Paris, January 1996. His seminars, in France and in America, have become something of an institution over the years, the place where he presents the ongoing evolution of his thought in a remarkable combination of thoroughly mapped-out positions, sketches of new material, and exchanges with students and interlocutors.
As has become a pattern in Derrida's recent work, the form of this presentation is a self-conscious enactment of its content. The book consists of two texts on facing pages. "Invitation" by Anne Dufourmantelle appears on the left (an invitation that of course originates in a response), clarifying and inflecting Derrida's "response" on the right. The interaction between them not only enacts the "hospitality" under discussion, but preserves something of the rhythms of teaching.
The volume also characteristically combines careful readings of canonical texts and philosophical topics with attention to the most salient events in the contemporary world, using "hospitality" as a means of rethinking a range of political and ethical situations. "Hospitality" is viewed as a question of what arrives at the borders, in the initial surprise of contact with an other, a stranger, a foreigner. For example, Antigone is revisited in light of the question of impossible mourning; "Oedipus at Colonus" is read via concerns that also apply to teletechnology; the trial of Socrates is brought into conjunction with the televised funeral of Francois Mitterrand.

These two lectures by Jacques Derrida, "Foreigner Question" and "Step of Hospitality/No Hospitality," derive from a series of seminars on "hospitality" conducted by Derrida in Paris, January 1996. His seminars, in France and in America, have become something of an institution over the years, the place where he presents the ongoing evolution of his thought in a remarkable combination of thoroughly mapped-out positions, sketches of new material, and exchanges with students and interlocutors.
As has become a pattern in Derrida's recent work, the form of this presentation is a self-conscious enactment of its content. The book consists of two texts on facing pages. "Invitation" by Anne Dufourmantelle appears on the left (an invitation that of course originates in a response), clarifying and inflecting Derrida's "response" on the right. The interaction between them not only enacts the "hospitality" under discussion, but preserves something of the rhythms of teaching.
The volume also characteristically combines careful readings of canonical texts and philosophical topics with attention to the most salient events in the contemporary world, using "hospitality" as a means of rethinking a range of political and ethical situations. "Hospitality" is viewed as a question of what arrives at the borders, in the initial surprise of contact with an other, a stranger, a foreigner. For example, Antigone is revisited in light of the question of impossible mourning; "Oedipus at Colonus" is read via concerns that also apply to teletechnology; the trial of Socrates is brought into conjunction with the televised funeral of Francois Mitterrand.

Asserting that a history of shopping was, until recently, a history of women, Rachel Bowlby trains her eye on the evolution of the modern shopper. She uses a compelling blend of history, literary analysis, and cultural criticism to explore the rise of department stores and supermarkets of the United States, France, and Great Britain.

Bowlby recalls the fascinating early days of these institutions. In the mid-nineteenth century, when department stores first developed, their fabulous new buildings brought middle-class women into town, where they could indulge in what was then a new activity: a day's shopping. The stores offered luxury, flattering women into believing that they belonged in a beautiful environment. It is here, Bowlby argues, that the idea of the modern woman's passion for fashion and shopping took hold.

Developed in the twentieth century, supermarkets took an opposite tack: they offered functionality, standardization, and cheapness. However, Bowlby claims, despite their differences, the two institutions belong together as emblematic of their respective eras' social developments: the department store with the growth of cities, the supermarket with the proliferation of suburbs. With their dazzling lights and displays, both supermarkets and department stores were thought to produce in females an enhanced or trance-like state of mind.

For readers who regard shopping as a spectator or participatory sport, and for those who wish to understand our culture and the psychology of women, or those who simply enjoy a witty, literate romp through the aisles, "Carried Away" is the perfect purchase.

The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and about the state of literary education inside schools and universities. The category of 'the literary' has always been contentious. What is clear, however, is how increasingly it is dismissed or is unrecognised as a way of thinking or an arena for thought. It is sceptically challenged from within, for example, by the sometimes rival claims of cultural history, contextualized explanation, or media studies. It is shaken from without by even greater pressures: by economic exigency and the severe social attitudes that can follow from it; by technological change that may leave the traditional forms of serious human communication looking merely antiquated. For just these reasons this is the right time for renewal, to start reinvigorated work into the meaning and value of literary reading. We live in days, no leaving them or choosing them. What's in a day? With their natural narrative arc they begin and they end, and in between we talk about how they are going or wonder 'where' they have gone. They each have their small stories, non-stories, ephemeral stories. So every day slips by, most days much like most other days. We eat, we sleep, we go to work; we endure, enjoy, continue. Day after day, day before day, it is the recurring of no particular story in endless, beginningless succession. At the same time, any single day is also a unique date, with its multi-digit identity, its moment-at last, and never again-of here and now, today. And on longer scales, the slow small shifts of ordinary days and their surrounding stories will eventually remake the days that have been and gone as the times that are no more. An ordinary day from decades, let alone centuries ago must now be a 'once' long passed away, the old days to be regretted-or to be revived in all the curiosity of their historical difference. Everyday Stories makes us think again about the ordinary life we are in, day after day and day by day: always the same, and always slightly changing. Entering into the single day, drawing out the stories that surround us, this book goes into everyday stories of many descriptions, old and new: both in literature and in that story-laden place and time we call real life.

Among the elementary human stories, parenthood has tended to go without saying. Compared to the spectacular attachments of romantic love, it is only the predictable sequel. Compared to the passions of childhood, it is just a background. But in recent decades, far-reaching changes in typical family forms and in procreative possibilities (through reproductive technologies) have brought out new questions. Why do people want (or not want) to be parents? How has the 'choice' first enabled by contraception changed the meaning of parenthood? Looking not only at new parental parts but at older parental stories, in novels and other works, this fascinating book offers fresh angles and arguments for thinking about parenthood today.

In the wake of the Dreyfus affair and the Shoah, many French intellectuals have maintained rich and complex relationships with Judaism, beyond as well as within the religious dimension. Whether they approach it via history, philosophy, biblical studies or sociology, or following a personal itinerary, many contemporary intellectuals are deeply involved in Jewish culture. Interviewed at length by Elisabeth Weber, this volume presents the meditations of seven well-known French thinkers on the special relations of their own intellectual pursuit to Judaism. As memory or as the place of "circumfession" (in Jacques Derrida's words), as the symbol of the "unrepresentable" (Jean-Francois Lyotard) or as the witness, according to Emmanuel Levinas, to a "biblical humanity," Judaism is continually engaged in renewing and displacing contemporary thought. The volume includes interviews with: Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Jacques Derrida, Rita Thalmann, Emmanuel Levinas, Leon Poliakov, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Luc Rosenzweig.

What will become of the shops? More than ever, the high street appears to be under mortal threat, its shops boarded up as the sad 'bricks and mortar' survivals of a pre-online retail world. But behind the bleak appearance, there is more to see. Back to the Shops offers a set of short and surprising chapters, each one a window into a different shop type or mode of selling. Old shopping streets are seen from new angles; fast fashion shows up in eighteenth-century edits. Here are pedlars and pop-ups, mail order catalogues and mobile greengrocers' shops. Here too are food markets open till late on a Saturday night, and tiny subscription libraries tucked away at the back of the sweet shop. Over time, shops have occupied radically different places in cultural arguments and in our everyday lives. They are essential sources of daily provisions, but they are also the visible evidence of consuming excess. They are local community hubs and they are dreamlands of distraction. Shops are inherently spaces of imagination as well as of practicality. They belong with their own surrounding streets and town; they bring back the times and places of our lives. They linger in stories of all kinds, whether far-fetched or round the corner. From butcher to baker and from markets to motor vans-after reading this book, you will want to go back to the shops.

Jean-Francois Lyotard is one of Europe's leading philosophers, well known for his work The Postmodern Condition. In this important new study he develops his analysis of the phenomenon of postmodernity. In a wide-ranging discussion the author examines the philosophy of Kant, Heidegger, Adorno, and Derrida and looks at the works of modernist and postmodernist artists such as Cezanne, Debussy, and Boulez. Lyotard addresses issues such as time and memory, the sublime and the avant-garde, and the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Throughout his discussion he considers the close but problematic links between modernity, progress, and humanity, and the transition to postmodernity. Lyotard claims that it is the task of literature, philosophy, and the arts, to bear witness to and explain this difficult transition. This important contribution to aesthetic and philosophical debates will be of great interest to students in philosophy, literary, and cultural theory and politics.

Among the elementary human stories, parenthood has tended to go without saying. Compared to the spectacular attachments of romantic love, it is only the predictable sequel. Compared to the passions of childhood, it is just a background. But in recent decades, far-reaching changes in typical family forms and in procreative possibilities (through reproductive technologies) have brought out new questions. Why do people want (or not want) to be parents? How has the 'choice' first enabled by contraception changed the meaning of parenthood? Looking not only at new parental parts but at older parental stories, in novels and other works, this fascinating book offers fresh angles and arguments for thinking about parenthood today.

Why do some people still choose psychoanalysis-Freud's so-called talking cure-when numerous medications are available that treat the symptoms of psychic distress so much faster? Elisabeth Roudinesco tackles this difficult question, exploring what she sees as a "depressive society": an epidemic of distress addressed only by an increasing reliance on prescription drugs.

Far from contesting the efficacy of new medications like Prozac, Zoloft, and Viagra in alleviating the symptoms of any number of mental or nervous conditions, Roudinesco argues that the use of such drugs fails to solve patients' real problems. In the man who takes Viagra without ever wondering why he is suffering from impotence and the woman who is given antidepressants to deal with the loss of a loved one, Roudinesco sees a society obsessed with efficiency and desperate for the quick fix.

She argues that "the talking cure" and pharmacology represent not just different approaches to psychiatry, but different worldviews. The rush to treat symptoms is itself symptomatic of an antiseptic and depressive culture in which thought is reduced to the firing of neurons and desire is just a chemical secretion. In contrast, psychoanalysis testifies to human freedom and the power of language.

More than a hundred years ago, Freud made a new mythology by revising an old one: Oedipus, in Sophocles' tragedy the legendary perpetrator of shocking crimes, was an Everyman whose story of incest and parricide represented the fulfillment of universal and long forgotten childhood wishes. The Oedipus complex - child, mother, father - suited the nuclear families of the mid-twentieth century. But a century after the arrival of the psychoanalytic Oedipus, it might seem that modern lives are very much changed. Typical family formations and norms of sexual attachment are changing, while the conditions of sexual difference, both biologically and socially, have undergone far-reaching modifications. Today, it is possible to choose and live subjective stories that the first psychoanalytic patients could only dream of. Different troubles and enjoyments are speakable and unspeakable; different selves are rejected, discovered, or sought. Many kinds of hitherto unrepresented or unrepresentable identity have entered into the ordinary surrounding stories through which children and adults find their bearings in the world, while others have become obsolete. Biographical narratives that would previously have seemed unthinkable or incredible--'a likely story '-have acquired the straightforward plausibility of a likely story.
This book takes two Freudian routes to think about some of the present entanglements of identity. First, it follows Freud in returning to Greek tragedies - Oedipus and others - which may now appear strikingly different in the light of today's issues of family and sexuality. And second, it re-examines Freud's own theories from these newer perspectives, drawing out different strands of his stories of how children develop and how people change (or don't). Both kinds of mythology, the classical and the theoretical, may now, in their difference, illuminate some of the forming stories of our contemporary world of serial families, multiple sexualities, and new reproductive technologies.

When something called theory first broke onto the seemingly stagnant scene of literary studies, it offered bright new ways and fields for critical reading: new methods and subjects, and also new words to speak them. The syllabus and the styles would never be the same, and reading was proudly claimed as a mode of social critique. The short pieces brought together in Talking Walking engage with all sorts of arguments then, now and earlier about the uses and history of critical reading -- of literature, and also of other cultural forms. There is much on the changing styles of literary-critical writing, and on the place of particular writers -- Virginia Woolf or Jacques Derrida -- in contemporary critical culture. There are pieces on cliches, on footnotes, on the language of the university job interview, on the use of domesticate as a catch-all negative term. There are also essays on cultural questions informed by critical theory. For instance: why has the topic of walking been such a fruitful thinking theme in literature and philosophy? How does the history of shopping and marketing theory intersect with those of literature and subjectivity? How, in the light of reproductive technologies and new social forms, has becoming a parent turned into a culturally prominent kind of story? These are some of the questions that arise in the interview and essays that make up Rachel Bowlbys book, which derives from several decades of working and writing and talking and walking within the changing contemporary landscape of literary and critical studies. Old and new arrivals into this world will find pleasures of reading and matter for thinking on every page.