Love and Reading: An Essay in Applied Psychoanalysis

Love and Reading discusses 18th and 19th Century English fiction, the aesthetics of Burke and Kant, and contemporary literary theory. It stresses that language should be referential and argues for a way of reading that would not provide narcissistic gratification: a way of reading that would enable us instead to see through «the huge and terrible deception, » as Tolstoy put it, that hides «both life and death.»