Fashioning the Self from the Chasm"De profundis" and the Chronotrope of Post-Prison Time
ISSN: 1137-6368
Año de publicación: 2000
Número: 22
Páginas: 159-174
Tipo: Artículo
Otras publicaciones en: Miscelánea: A journal of english and american studies
Resumen
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 hos Wilde negotiates time and space as a means to narrate the self and the other. Counter to claims that De Profundis is a confession, 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.