The Politics of the Dreamscape

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-ix

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Seth Rogoff

   Pages 1-18

3. Dreams and Power: Authoritarian Territory, Anarchistic Space in the Garden of Eden, William Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job, and Robert Frost’s “After Apple-Picking”

   • Seth Rogoff

   Pages 19-59

4. Dreams and Power Between Jacob and Joseph, a Speculative Interpretation

   • Seth Rogoff

   Pages 61-97

5. Freud’s Conquest of the Dreamscape: Dynamics of Power in The Interpretation of Dreams and Dora

   • Seth Rogoff

   Pages 99-133

6. Dream-Texts Integrating and Disintegrating: Philip Roth’s Goodbye Columbus, Carl Jung’s “Individual Dream Symbolism in Relation to Alchemy,” and Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight

   • Seth Rogoff

   Pages 135-193

7. Dreams and Power in Kafka’s The Castle

   • Seth Rogoff

   Pages 195-243

8. J. Allan Hobson’s Dreamstage in Context

   • Seth Rogoff

   Pages 245-284

9. Conclusion

   • Seth Rogoff

   Pages 285-288

10. Back Matter

    Pages 289-292

    PDF

This book traces the intersection of dreams and power in order to analyze the complex ways representations of dreams and paradigms of dream interpretation reinforce and challenge authoritarian, hierarchical structures. The book puts forward the concept of the dreamscape as a pre-representational space that contains anarchistic attributes, including its instability or chaotic nature and the lack of a stable or core selfhood and identity in its subjects. The book situates this concept of the dreamscape through an analysis of the Daoist notions of the “transformation of things” and hundun (chaos) and the biblical concept of tehom (the deep). Using this conceptual framework, this book analyzes paradigmatic moments of dream interpretation along a spectrum from radical, anarchist assertions of the primal dreamscape to authoritarian dream-texts that seek to reify identity, define and establish hierarchy, and support coercive relationships between unequal subjects. The book’s key figures include William Blake, Robert Frost, Jacob and Joseph from Genesis, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Jean Rhys, Franz Kafka, and the neurobiologist J. Allan Hobson

• Dreams
• Anarchism
• Literary Modernism
• Biblical Studies
• Neurohumanities

• Departments of History and English, University of Southern Maine, Portland, USA

  Seth Rogoff

Seth Rogoff is a novelist and a scholar of literary and cultural analysis. He is the author of the novels First, the Raven: a Preface (2017) and Thin Rising Vapors (2018). He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam’s Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), The Netherlands, and is currently a lecturer in history and English at the University of Southern Maine, USA, and a member of the MFA faculty at Maine College of Art.  

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