Reading Psychosis: Readers, Texts and Psychoanalysis - Softcover

Evelyne Keitel suggests that certain contemporary novels can alternately create states of acute anxiety and intense pleasure in their readers. She defines this genre, which includes writers such as Plath and Lessing, as "psychotic literature". Keitel distinguishes between pathographic texts (which analyze the distance between the author's neurosis and his or her point of view) and psychopathographies, which draw readers into an internalised pathographical experience. Reading Psychosis' shows how phases of pleasurable reading experience are intermittently disrupted by anxiety and anguish in a highly individual rhythm, a rhythm which echoes both the originating disturbance and the process of reading.