Fashioning the Self from the Chasm: De Profundis and the Chronotope of Post-Prison Time
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.200011225Keywords:
Oscar Wilde's De Profundis, Lacan, The phallus, Bakhtin, The chronotope, Greenblatt, Self-fashioning, Homomorphic, Symbolic exchangeAbstract
This paper focuses on Wilde's letter, De Profundis, with relation to various forms of debt (economic and moral-metaphorical, which, it is argued, function within an economy of symbolic exchange and desire. The Bakhtinian concept of the chronotope is merged with semiotics, Lac(k)anian psychoanalysis, and Greenblatt's notion of self-fashioning to explore how Wilde negotiates time and space as a means to narrate the self and the other. Counter to claims that De Profundis is a confesión, it is suggested here that it may be seen as a pedagogical tract in epistolary form: one which constructs the letter's addressee as a negative "other" in order to preserve the integrity of the writing itself.
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