Since the 1980s, the theories of subjectivity that have most influenced literary studies have shared an antihumanist perspective, one that posits that both human selfhood and the experience of authentic contact with another are merely illusions born of a modern Western ideology. Along with other subfields, the domain of literature and psychoanalysis has been affected by this bias toward antihumanist theories of subjectivity. But it is not because these represent the most sophisticated, best validated theories available to us. As I here argue, practicing psychoanalysts have taken a very different conceptual path, grounded in their own clinical findings and in recent experimental work in psychiatry. In fact the most influential current psychoanalytic theories support the idea that some form of self-integration is valuable. Ironically, then, scholars working in literature and psychoanalysis adhere to our profession’s default antihumanism at the expense of hiding out from the most important conversations in psychoanalysis today. What keeps this system in place is a widespread form of intellectual intimidation, which in fact depends conceptual trickery. In explaining the trickery, I hope to help to clear the way for a more capacious theoretical conversation within this subfield.

This chapter aims to examine how Augustine appropriated Cicero’s philosophical thought. The first section studies the role of the Ciceronian protreptic Hortensius – the eudaimonism and the post-mortem destiny of the soul – in Augustine's philosophical project. The second analyzes the imprint of the philosophical dialogues of Cicero on Augustine’s early “Dialogues of Cassiciacum” (Contra academicos, De beata vita, De ordine, 386 ce); this influence is obvious in their literary genre and in the major philosophical topics they deal with (epistemology, ethics, providence). In his late masterpiece the City of God, Augustine discusses several Ciceronian notions (fate and foreknowledge; populus and respublica; passions) and translates them into a Christian framework: this is the focus of the third section. The last section outlines the evolution of Augustine’s judgment on Cicero, whom he considered a defender of the Neo-Academic position on the one hand, and, on the other, as a spokesman for Platonic philosophy.

This chapter explains the relevance of literature to understand psychoanalysis, and the importance of thinking psychoanalytically when reading literature. Paying attention to Freud's interest in Oedipus, Hamlet, and the theatre, and his fascination with the uncanny, which shows itself particularly in literature, I distinguish between Freud's sense of the unconscious as what psychoanalysis addresses itself to, and Lacan on the importance of language, as that which the individual subject enters into and which structures existence as the "symbolic order." The debates this produces with Derrida, critiquing Lacan for phallogocentrism, and also with varieties of feminist analysis, and with the place of sexual difference within psychoanalytic theory, are outlined as topics for further study. Suggestions too are made of literary texts that offer themselves for discussion in the light of psychoanalysis, Freudian, Kleinian, Lacanian, and post-Lacanian.

Cicero bequeathed to later political thought influential accounts of cosmopolitanism, empire, and just war theory. This chapter examines these themes in his De republica, De legibus, and De officiis. I argue that Cicero’s discussion evinces a nuanced and sensitive treatment of the universalism characteristic of the natural law cosmopolitan tradition and the particularism of the republican tradition. Cicero’s theorizing shows a greater coherence than most modern scholars suppose. Ultimately, his “patriotic cosmopolitanism” offers a rich response to a question of immediate importance in contemporary politics, where the place of the nation in our global order is hotly debated: how may our allegiances to our particular political communities square with our aspirations for global justice? For readers interested in “international relations,” Cicero remains good to think with.

The Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis historicizes the link between literature and psychoanalysis, addressing current trends in the field, while predicting the impact the volume can have on its future directions and discoveries. Born within the cultural matrix of nineteenth-century Vienna, the theory of psychoanalysis found its way into the intellectual mainstream in the first part of the twentieth-century. In the second half of the twentieth-century, it went on to take hold in the American and European academy, first in medicine and then in the humanities. Now in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the academic influence of psychoanalysis has waned, due to sweeping cultural and critical forces. This falling off is important to understand as the original bond between literature and psychoanalysis is revived to offer new directions for our century. The Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis will place literature at the generative core of this ambition, for it remains a repository of knowledge derived from creativity that makes us human. The consilience between literature and psychoanalysis predicated Freud’s discoveries of the unconscious; that same family bond can foster revelatory and revolutionary truths for the next generation.

Plato was for Cicero the prince among philosophers. Cicero himself identified with Plato in all his richness and abundance as a writer and thinker, but also as a model for the politically engaged intellectual. This chapter studies first Plato’s presence in Cicero’s letters in the period 54–49 bce, the tempestuous years before the Roman Republic was finally torn apart. Then it turns to consider the three major Platonic dialogues composed at that time: De oratore, De republica, De legibus, in which he articulates grand political and cultural ambitions for the orator and a vision of how a republican polity should and could be conceived and conducted. A brief final section looks at the theoretical writings on oratory and philosophy in 46–44, mostly composed during Caesar’s dictatorship, when Cicero’s voice in the public sphere was almost entirely silenced. His main literary efforts were devoted to the construction of a philosophical encyclopedia, in which the systems of the Hellenistic schools became the main focus. His veneration of Plato and his attraction to Platonic idealism in various aspects remain evident. But the intensity of his earlier engagement with Plato has become a thing of the past.

Animal Figures examines the ways literature and psychoanalysis interact in their deployments of “animals,” while also suggesting how they might address the other-than-human. What might be required of both to think animal subjectivity non-anthropocentrically? In a close reading of Emmanuel Levinas’s Name of a Dog, I demonstrate how the text reanimates animate being (specifically a dog) in linguistic figuration through the literary or the rhetorical and according to analytics resembling psychoanalysis more than philosophy. While thematically Levinas’s chapter addresses the ethical and religious as they pertain to the figure of the dog, the chapter, in its linguistic and rhetorical performance, enacts a relation between language and animal being – elsewhere neologized as animot or animetaphor – more akin to psychoanalysis than to philosophy.

For approximately the last thirty years, Cicero’s reputation as a philosopher has been rising after close to a century of very low esteem. The alleged reasons for this disrepute are numerous and varied. Cicero was Roman, and Romans were thought to be neither scientific nor philosophical. He wrote in Latin, when the genuine language of philosophy was and is Greek. No original thinker, he was not so much a philosopher as translator and compiler, pasting together various philosophical works from the second and first century bce. This he did in his spare time, for Cicero was an amateur philosopher. His main pursuits were politics and judicial advocacy. When he turned to philosophy, he was content to adopt a form of eclecticism amenable to his own changing status in the troubled last decades of the Roman Republic. This short introduction won’t be covering Cicero’s philosophical works and their context (for which the reader should consult Chapter 1); it aims only to present the various and complementary ways in which this Companion, building on earlier studies, may answer these charges and allow us to gain a more accurate and richer picture of Cicero as a philosopher.

Cicero conceives of rhetoric, politics, and philosophy as so interconnected that they are, or at least should be, a unity under the rubric “eloquence.” To be sufficiently capacious to include all three, eloquence means something different to Cicero than to us, with its current meaning of fluent or persuasive expression. Rather than simple (or even outstanding) facility in language, eloquence for Cicero is public speech, especially political speech, rooted in wisdom. Cicero, most especially in his rhetorical masterpiece, De oratore, deems the eloquens, the man of (true) eloquence, to be the perfect orator, who is simultaneously the ideal statesman, articulating his ideas in words so powerful that he can move his audience in whichever direction he so desires. Because of the danger inherent in such forceful persuasion, the eloquent orator must apply his rhetorical skills only after having acquired “all-embracing knowledge.” Thus, Cicero’s orator-cum-statesman is also a philosopher of a sort – a philosopher who is a man of action, who uses his wisdom to promote the common welfare, unlike those philosophers who shirk “politics and its responsibilities on deliberate principle,” and who criticize and scorn the orator-statesman’s practice of speaking.

This chapter adopts, describes, and critiques three complementary perspectives on children’s literature: (1) psychoanalytic studies of and interpretations of children’s books; (2) effects of psychoanalysis on the work of children’s book authors and artists; (3) ways in which psychoanalysis might learn from the wisdom of children’s literature. Among the authors discussed are Bruno Bettelheim, Maurice Sendak, Beatrix Potter, and Elena Ferrante.

This chapter considers the significance of the psychoanalytic concept of melancholia to queer theory and literature, using James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room as a case study. The chapter traces the ways in which queerness – particularly queer love – is haunted by melancholia by highlighting the manner in which melancholia is inextricable from the passionate relationship between David and Giovanni, the lovers at the novel’s core. Yet Baldwin arguably also universalizes melancholia by demonstrating that all of the novel’s characters, including David’s girlfriend Hella, are deeply melancholic. Melancholia, then, is not merely a queer predicament but rather – as the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan also claimed – a part of the human condition. The chapter consequently draws a distinction between constitutive (existential) and context-specific (socially imposed) forms of melancholia, illustrating that queer melancholia tends to fall into the latter genre of melancholia due to the discrimination, persecution, and shame that often characterize queer lives and loves.

Over the past twenty years, experts on early North America have increasingly turned to comparative and connected modes of study to explain the effects of colonialism on social, political, and aesthetic developments throughout the so-called New World, where English and Spanish empires appropriated and carved up the largest sections of Indigenous territories. Despite notable linguistic, religious, and chronological differences in Anglo and Iberian colonialisms, this critical hemispheric turn recognizes the interconnected nature of lived experience and writing in the region. As part of this volume’s reflection on the history and future of methods in early American studies, this chapter analyzes four major comparative paradigms in the study of the colonial Americas: generic, genetic, appositional, and mediative approaches. As I discuss each of these approaches, I provide examples from primary sources and critical studies published in the past ten years, outlining current modes of scholarship and future directions in the field.

If one of the most prominent features of early America was the collision of peoples from two hemispheres, much of this collision found expression through different expectations of how men and women should behave. Because participants in these encounters saw that what they thought of as natural attributes of men and women were not consistent across the lines of culture, and because printed descriptions of those encounters expanded the audience for those encounters, it is not an exaggeration to say that early America as a site of contact did much to provoke widespread contemplation of what in the twentieth century came to be known as the distinction between sex and gender. Texts such as John Marrant’s account of his captivity in a Cherokee town and Amerigo Vespucci’s letters illustrate how understanding early America in all its complexity requires accounting for the intricacies of gender as they were performed in intersection with other identity categories such as race. The history of colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade also shows how gender became an instrument of domination. Finally, the stories of figures like Catherine Tekakwitha demonstrate that occasionally individuals found new lives in early America in part by adopting foreign performances of gender.