Venus infers

These poems mark the fault lines of myth, dream and memory, of a doubled identity emerging from the clash of war, desire and the cacophony of the city. 1974/Dead Sister , a narrative poem with a cast that includes Lewis Carroll’s Alice, Freud’s Dora, the Lady of Shalott, Ophelia, Esther, female cowboys and other deposed goddesses is ‘an autobiography’ of an imaginary dead twin. Alev Adil delineates the traces of a sense of displacement, but while the poems mark those frenetic uncertainties and erasures they celebrate the plenitude of new stories, epistemologies and possibilities born out of falling into fracture (the fracture of memory, gender, identity, culture) more than they mourn any loss. Venus Infers is haunted by the deities of ancient Greek myths and their contemporary manifestations. Eurydice is hiding out in Hackney, sometimes glimpsed on the Jubilee Line; Ariadne remembers her ancient palace as she prowls the endless corridors of a London hotel; Penelope still waits for peace in the ruins of Marash/Varosha. Cyprus often features in these poems, both as a landscape for myth and as a site for contemporary, and contested, memories. [From the Author]

Jung as a writer

Jung as a Writer traces a relationship between Jung and literature by analysing his texts using the methodology of literary theory. This investigation serves to illuminate the literary nature of Jung’s writing in order to shed new light on his psychology and its relationship with literature as a cultural practice. Jung employed literary devices throughout his writing, including direct and indirect argument, anecdote, fantasy, myth, epic, textual analysis and metaphor. Susan Rowland examines Jung’s use of literary techniques in several of his works, including Anima and Animus, On the Nature of the Psyche, Psychology and Alchemy and Synchronicity and describes Jung’s need for literature in order to capture in writing his ideas about the unconscious. Jung as a Writer succeeds in demonstrating Jung’s contribution to literary and cultural theory in autobiography, gender studies, postmodernism, feminism, deconstruction and hermeneutics and concludes by giving a new culturally-orientated Jungian criticism. The application of literary theory to Jung’s works provides a new perspective on Jungian Psychology that will be of interest to anyone involved in the study of Jung, Psychoanalysis, literary theory and cultural studies. [From the Publisher]