Nicholas Royle

Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel

Foreword - Acknowledgements - List of Abbreviations - Introduction - Abeyances: The Hotel and The Last September - Shivered: To the North and Friends and Relations - Fanatic Immobility: The House in Paris - Dream Wood: The Death of the Heart - Sheer Kink: The Heat of the Day - Obelisk: A World of Love - Trance: The Little Girls - Convulsions: Eva Trout - Index

In memory of Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was the most original and inspiring writer and philosopher of our time. In a series of distinctive essays that are at once self-contained and intricately linked, Royle explores the legacies of Derridas thinking in the context of philosophy, language, globalisation, war, terrorism, justice, the democracy to come, poetry, literature, memory, mourning, the gift, friendship and dreams. Lucid, inventive and at times funny, Royle allows us to appreciate how much Derridas work has altered the ways we read and think. Autobiography, childrens literature, the Gothic and modernist fiction, for example, figure together with philosophy, queer studies, speech act theory and psychoanalysis. The writings of Horace Walpole, Herman Melville, E. M. Forster, Elizabeth Bowen, Joe Brainard and David McKee are illuminatingly put in play alongside Shakespeare. Royles book suggests that one of Derridas most profound legacies has to do with the combination of responsibility and freedom his work inspires for both reading and writing. In Memory of Jacques Derrida offers an exceptionally clear overview of Derridas work, while also tracing directions in which it might productively be read in the future.

Even the Title: On the State of Narrative Theory Today

This essay considers the state of narrative theory today, giving particular attention to the rhetorical figure of aposiopesis (the unfinished sentence) and mind-reading or telepathy. Detailed readings of Joseph Conrad, Elizabeth Bowen and Jon McGregor interweave with a critical assessment of the work if a number of contemporary narrative theorists, including Jonathan Culler, Brian Richardson and Lisa Zunshine.

A reassessment of Elizabeth Bowen's Friends and Relations: the quiet catastrophe

This essay proposes a re-reading of Elizabeth Bowens largely overlooked third novel, Friends and Relations. Focussing on effects such as stammering, bathos, narrative catastrophe, narrative voice and non-human animals, allows for a proper appreciation of the radical possibilities that are opened up within Bowens innovative narrative form.

Dream Treatment: On Sitting Down to Read a Letter from Freud

This text seeks to analyse a dream in which Freud writes to the author. Particular attention is given to the notion of treatment and, in a memorable phrase from Helene Cixous, ‘how to treat the dream as a dream’. Royle draws on diverse references (Donald Trump, Hugh Laurie, Howard Jacobson, Wallace Stevens, Jacques Derrida and Cixous), and focuses on a range of Freuds writings (a letter to Thomas Mann, The Interpretation of Dreams, ‘A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis’ and ‘A Note on the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis’), in order to explore the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature. Particular attention is given to free association, deferred effect and the epistolary.

30@30: the future of literary thinking

All good writing takes us somewhere uncomfortable. One of the great services given by Textual Practice over the past 30 years has been to create a comfortable place for uncomfortable criticism. Yet right now, it is not writing but the world itself that is proving incommodious. What should criticism be doing in a political culture that has embraced hostility?

On creative and critical writing, environments and dreaming: veering (1)

The thing about you is never knowing, my mother once said, which way you are going to jump. My mother is no longer alive. She spent the last decade of her life with Alzheimers (strange phrase), it...

Julius Caesar and the Democracy to Come

This essay was originally delivered as a lecture in French, `Le poete? (trans. Geoffrey Bennington), at `La democratie a venir (autour de Jacques Derrida)?, a decade at Cerisy-la-Salle, Normandy, in July 2002. It was subsequently published in La democratie a venir: Autour de Jacques Derrida, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (Paris: Galilee, 2004), 567-82; and in English as `The Poet: Julius Caesar and the Democracy to Come?, in Angles on Derrida: Jacques Derrida and Anglophone Literature, eds. Thomas Dutoit and Philippe Romanski, special issue of the Oxford Literary Review, vol. 25 (2003) (pub. 2004), 39-61. It then underwent significant revision for publication in the volume entitled Julius Caesar in Western Culture, ed. Maria Wyke (Blackwell, 2006).