FELMAN, Shoshana 1942–

PERSONAL: Born January 29, 1942, in France; Education: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, B.A. (summa cum laude), 1964, M.A. (summa cum laude), 1966; attended University of Geneva, 1969–70; University of Grenoble, Ph.D. (highest distinction), 1970.

ADDRESSES: Office—French Department, 305 WLH, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520.

CAREER: Yale University, New Haven, CT, instructor, 1970–71, assistant professor, 1971–73, associate professor, 1973–80, professor and director of graduate studies for French department, 1980–86, Thomas E. Donnelly Professor of French and Comparative Literature, 1986–. University of Haifa, Israel, visiting professor, 1973; member of numerous academic committees at Yale University, including Danforth Fellow-ship committee, 1972, advisory committee of the arts and sciences on the education of women, 1982–84, and search committee on senior appointment in Judaic studies, 1984–87.

AWARDS, HONORS: French government fellowship, 1967–68, for preparation of doctoral dissertation in France; Swiss government fellowship, 1969–70, for study at the University of Geneva; prizes from the University of Geneva, 1970, and the University of Grenoble, 1972, for best doctoral dissertation; Ford Foundation research fellowship, 1972; Guggenheim fellowship, 1973–74; American Council of Learned Societies grants, 1978, 1982; named Chevalier des palmes academiques by French government, 1982, for services rendered to French culture; Whitney Humanities Center fellow, 1985–88.

WRITINGS:

La "Folie" dans l'oeuvre romanesque de Stendhal, Jose Corti (Paris, France), 1971.

(Editor) Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading—Otherwise, Yale French Studies (New Haven, CT), 1977.

La Folie et la chose litteraire, Seuil (Paris, France), 1978, translation published as Writing and Madness: Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 1985.

Le Scandale du corps parlant: Don Juan avec Austin ou la Seduction en deux langues, Seuil (Paris, France), 1980, translation published as The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 1983, with a new foreword by Stanley Cavell and afterword by Judith Butler, Stanford University Press (Stanford, CA), 2003.

Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1987.

(Editor, with Dori Laub) Testimony: Cries of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, Routledge (New York, NY), 1992.

What Does a Woman Want? Reading and Sexual Differences, Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, MD), 1993.

The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2002.

Contributor to books, including The Literary Freud: Mechanisms of Defense and the Poetic Will, edited by Joseph Smith, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1980. Contributor to periodicals, including Yale French Studies, Romantic Review, and Diacritics.

SIDELIGHTS: Shoshana Felman is a professor of French and comparative literature who has won respect for her publications on literature and psychoanalysis. She is also considered one of the foremost readers of the works of twentieth-century psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. According to Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Kathleen C. Lonsdale, Felman "questions many of the cultural assumptions associated with Freudian psychoanalytic theory and advocates Lacan, with his emphasis on linguistics and rhetoric, as the proper inheritor—and even replacement—of the Freudian tradition."

Commenting on Felman's Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture, reviewer Robert Con Davis wrote in Modern Language Notes: "In her most recent book, Shoshana Felman demonstrates once again that she is a major reader of Jacques Lacan, probably the major interpreter of Lacan in America. Authoritative, wide-ranging, and yet always lucid, she has helped to shape Lacanian studies since the middle 1970s and … has been committed to exploring literary and cultural criticism in relation to the main registers of Lacan's thought—especially to what she frequently calls the force of his teaching, his 'revolutionary' pedagogy."

In addition to her interpretive readings of Lacan, Felman has written extensively on feminism in literature, as evidenced in her 1993 publication, What Does a Woman Want? Reading and Sexual Differences. In this study, Felman, borrowing psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud's famous question for her title, examines several examples of feminist literature to explain her theory that women do not have autobiographies and to shed light on masculine and feminine differences as depicted in literature. The first and final chapters explore the first theory, while the middle chapters look at autobiographical essays by Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, and Simone de Beauvoir, as well as writings by Freud and Honore de Balzac. According to Lonsdale, Felman "attempts to answer some rather thorny and important questions about the relationship of women's reading to female identity and, in turn, the relationship of the act of reading to patriarchal culture itself…. Felman suggests that it is more fruitful for women to resist masculine texts by entering into them in order to discover the hidden cultural and narrative dimensions within the text that might be useful for questioning the equation of the masculine reader and subject with the universal."

Commenting on Felman's analysis of the literature she explores in the book, Juliet Mitchell declared in the Times Literary Supplement, "It is a mark of Felman's extraordinary nuanced reading that these powerful original works are all enhanced by her analysis." Mitchell, however, expressed preference for the remaining chapters, writing: "The first and last chapters of What Does a Woman Want?, though lacking the immaculate brilliance of the others, come as a breath of fresh air. Here she is more exploratory, prepared to put herself at risk…. The hope of the last chapter is that, if we address other women, telling our story through other women's stories, we may start a collective autobiography." Another reviewer, Gita May, recorded what she found valuable about Felman's study in the French Review. "Although it does not purport to encompass 'an overview of feminist theory and scholarship,'" May wrote, "it attests to a wideranging and thorough familiarity with feminist writings on both sides of the Atlantic…. The underlying idea of 'theory' of a woman's autobiography is principally the narrative of her survival. If by now this is by no means a novel thesis, Shoshana Felman has succeeded in reformulating it in an exciting and provocative new way."

Felman's work throughout the 1990s focused on the psychodynamics of narratives of trauma. She points to the Holocaust as the primary locus of cultural and personal trauma in the twentieth century. The subject is personal for her, as she was born in France to a Jewish family during World War II. Her book Testimony: Cries of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, cowritten with Dori Laub, consists of seven essays that take on issues such as "how to narrate physical and emotional trauma through both memoir and fiction in such a manner as to make the narration useful for both testifier and listener," stated Lonsdale.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 246: Twentieth-Century American Cultural Theorists, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 2001.

PERIODICALS

Canadian Literature, autumn, 1982, pp. 122-123.

Choice, October, 1987, p. 303.

Contemporary Psychology, January, 1989, p. 76.

French Review, March, 1996, Gita May, review of What Does a Woman Want? Reading and Sexual Differences, pp. 631-632.

Harvard Educational Review, summer, 1995, p. 345.

Journal of Modern Literature, fall-winter, 1988, Sheldon Brivic, review of Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture, p. 22.

Law and Social Inquiry, spring, 2003, review of The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century, p. 615.

Library Journal, April 15, 1987, Richard Kuczhowski, review of Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight, p. 88.

Modern Language Notes, December, 1988, Robert Con Davis, review of Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight, pp. 1159-1163.

North American Review, March, 1988, p. 60.

Thought, December, 1988, p. 442.

Times Literary Supplement, March 4-10, 1988, p. 255; June 3, 1994, Juliet Mitchell, review of What Does a Woman Want?, p. 26.

Yale Law Journal, March, 2003, review of The Juridical Unconscious, p. 1304.