The Unwritten Enlightenment: Literature between Ideology and the Unconscious
by Nathan Gorelick

Unveiling the fantasies that drove the Enlightenment and created modern literature

Nathan Gorelick’s The Unwritten Enlightenment: Literature between Ideology and the Unconscious traces the relations between literary criticism and psychoanalysis to their shared origins in the Enlightenment era’s novels and novelistic discourse, where the period’s efforts to invent new notions of subjectivity and individualism are most apparent. Gorelick shows how modern concepts of literature and the unconscious were generated in response to these efforts and by an ethical concern for what the language of the Enlightenment excludes, represses, or struggles to erase. Troubling the idea of the Enlightenment on its own terms, subverting its supposed authority from within, Gorelick thus reveals the workings of unconscious fantasy at the foundations of our contemporary political realities. The Unwritten Enlightenment makes clear that to criticize the Enlightenment’s deficiencies, ambiguities, and legacies of violence without regard for the unconscious fantasies that drive them risks reproducing the very patterns of thought, action, and imagination that the Enlightenment novel already unsettles.

About the Author

Nathan Gorelick teaches in the English Department and for the First-Year Experience program at Barnard College. His areas of expertise include British and Continental Literature from the Restoration through Romanticism, Enlightenment philosophy and ideology, literary theory, and psychoanalysis. Before joining the faculty at Barnard, he was Associate Professor of English at Utah Valley University. His work has appeared in numerous journals of literary theory and Continental philosophy, including CR: The New Centennial Review, Continental Thought and Theory, Discourse, Parapraxis, Psychoanalytic Review, and Umbr(a): A Journal of the Unconscious. He is also an analyst in formation and Candidate in the Post-Graduate Certificate Program in Psychoanalysis at the Pulsion Institute in New York.

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