Mourning After Freud: Hypertranslation, Theory, Literature

Argues that Freud and a host of twentieth-century writers after him conceptualize mourning as a matter of "hypertranslation," an essentially linguistic endeavor.

Mourning After Freud offers new insight into a much-discussed but not yet exhausted topic of twentieth-century discourse. Whereas contemporary trauma theorists have identified interiorization as the central feature of Freud's theory of loss, Birger Vanwesenbeeck argues that Freud above all conceptualizes mourning as a form of translation and, more precisely, of "hypertranslation"--a translation of an unavailable original. Foregrounding the role of language in Freud's thought, the book reveals, provocatively, that the true heirs of his model are to be found not in psychoanalysis or trauma theory but rather in contiguous fields such as deconstruction, African American writing, and second-generation US immigrant literature more broadly. Through a series of close readings of twentieth-century theorists, poets, and novelists--from W. E. B. Du Bois to Sylvia Plath, from Henry Roth to Jacques Derrida--Mourning After Freud reveals time and again that the question of mourning cannot be separated from that of language.