| This dissertation locates a transvaluation of the riddle in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. During this time, aesthetic theory breaks away from an ideal of clarity and shifts toward the riddle as a desirable representational model. Through close readings of texts by the Schlegels, Hegel, and Tieck, the dissertation demonstrates how Romantic writers raise the riddle to a model for entire works of art, for symbolic function, and for a particular mode of reading.; The study then goes on show how Freud performs a similar transvaluation on dream material: what others saw as meaningless or useless, Freud takes as a profound yet obscure signifier. The dream becomes a riddle. This insight inaugurates the new discipline of psychoanalysis, and it is an insight made possible by the Romantic notion of riddle as a profound, poetic language. Psychoanalysis systematically articulates and applies the riddle as representational model. This is not to say that Freud simply extends the rhetoric of obscurity inherent in Romantic poetics; he expounds the riddle's techniques of distortion in order to reverse them and solve them.; Focusing on the riddle forces one to reevaluate the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis. It is not simply that literature is the object upon which psychoanalysis operates. Nor that literature, like the psyche, offers up a set of bewildering figures that the analyst translates into plain language. Rather, literature provides the very representational framework---codified in the riddle---of language that requires solving. The turn toward a rhetoric of obscurity, enacted in the literature and literary theory of the early-nineteenth century, first allows "balderdash" to attain the potential of a "precious communication." The riddle thereby serves as the invisible, organizing center of psychoanalytic thought. Literature always already implicates psychoanalysis because the text as riddle acts as a representational template that determines the paths and strategies of decipherment in advance of their application. |
