Editor’s Introduction

I will make an observation doubling as a prediction: after a long exile, psychoanalytic approaches to literature, film, and narrative, in general, are coming back. Psychoanalysis has become more visible across various fields pertaining to literary studies, and it is more actively present in the field of modernism. Among recent telltale signs, one can mention the Sunday Style issue of the New York Times covering a four-day festival of the American Psychoanalytic Association, in fact, its yearly conference. The article begins with: “Freud is still dead, but psychoanalysis may be experiencing a rebirth.” ¹ A weightier reference has been brought by the recent German compendium Handbuch Literatur & Psychoanalyse (“Handbook of Literature and Psychoanalysis”) edited by Frauke Berndt and Eckart Goebel and published by De Gruyter in the fall of 2017. The Handbuch’s seven hundred pages cover the most varied aspects of that ampersand, going from rhetoric and semiotics to media theory, including analyses of famous heroes from Moses to Hamlet, and surveying all literary genres, including in a stunning succession Traumliteratur (“dream literature”) and Traumaliteratur (“literature of trauma”). Let us hope that this collection can soon be translated into English.