This study closely associates literature and psychoanalysis in an endeavour to read differently, to read with a psychoanalytical eye. Such a reading entails taking into account the complexity of the unconscious as well as the degrees of resistance the reader has to grapple with in literary texts. Texts have specific organizations made of codes that can entice or trap readers in their deciphering activity, as Roland Barthes once famously theorized. In this entanglement with meaning, the compass is provided by a materialist psychoanalytical approach. The narratives are perceived as expressing philosophical arguments in the form of art.

Several key psychoanalytical concepts are delineated in the course of this work to explore the far side of language where the reader is drawn out of himself or herself in an uncertain attempt to experiment with unknown worlds of subjectivity. The uncanny, the demand for love, the work of mourning, Lacan’s realms of the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic, jouissance and desire, are some of the concepts that are gone into to highlight the tensions in the texts of Katherine Mansfield, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway or Virginia Woolf.

Jacques Sohier is an associate professor of literature at the University of Angers, UBL (Université Bretagne Loire).