Walter A. (Mac) Davis is professor emeritus of English at the Ohio State University. He is the author of Get the Guests: Psychoanalysis, Modern American Drama, and the Audience, also published by the University of Wisconsin Press, and Death's Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche Since 9/11.
“Inwardness and Existence accomplishes what no book before or after
has even approximated: it demonstrates with great lucidity and
insight the shared philosophical project that animates
psychoanalysis, Marxism, existentialism, and Hegelian dialectics.
Davis roots the reader in the enterprise of questioning what is
given and probing beyond what is safe in order to demonstrate that
psychoanalytic inquiry, Marxist politics, existential reflection,
and dialectical connection all move within the same orbit. No one
who reads it will ever think about existence itself in the same way
again. Davis’s landmark work will profoundly transform anyone who
reads it.” —Todd McGowan, author of The Real Gaze: Film Theory
after Lacan
"If the book we are reading does not wake us up, as with a fist
hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?" —Kafka, from the
epigraph
“Davis takes the historical strains between determinism and agency,
content and process, inwardness and the external (or historical
contingency and processsual immediacy) into dynamic, rupturing
explorations of categories which provoke the reader’s analytic
process. His writing is elegant and energetic, saturated with
stress, the heady rush of analysis, and the challenges of hard
work.” —Leighton Brooks McCutcheon, Journal of Mind and
Behavior
“Praiseworthy because it grapples with the fundamental assumptions
of these competing traditions, and does so with clarity and
conviction.” —David M. Thompson, Philosophy and Literature
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