Fashioning the Self from the Chasm: "De profundis" and the Chronotrope of Post-Prison Time

• Autores: David A. Walton
• Localización: Miscelánea: A journal of english and american studies, ISSN 1137-6368, ISSN-e 2386-4834, Nº 22, 2000, págs. 159-174
• Idioma: español
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• 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.