Sheldon George · Professor of Literature & Writing · Simmons University · Boston, MA
Sheldon George is Professor and Chair of the Department of Literature & Writing at Simmons University in Boston, Massachusetts. He is an Associate Editor of Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, and he is Secretary of the MLA forum Psychology, Psychoanalysis and Literature.
George's scholarship centers on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, narrative theory, and American and African American literature and culture. He is author of Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity, which has been called “The most important book on psychoanalysis and race in the twenty-first century” and is described as a book that "has changed the landscape of thinking about racism.”
George is coeditor , with Jean Wyatt, of Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers: Race, Ethics, Narrative Form. He is also coeditor, with Derek Hook, of Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity and Psychoanalytic Theory.
George's current book project is an essay collection, coedited with Jean Wyatt, titled Experimental Subjectivities: Race, Difference and Narrative Innovation in Contemporary Black Women’s Novels. The collection explores ways that black women writers experiment with literary form and pioneer stylistic inventions to express the subjectivities of their black characters.
Upcoming event
Keynote at Lacan: Clinic and Culture, Duquesne University, October 14-16, 2022
Racism and the Courtly Lady: From the Crusades to the Gentility of Lynchers Sheldon George
In his Ethics seminar, Jacques Lacan famously ties the figure of the Lady in courtly love to a cultural process of sublimation that defines societal manners and sensibilities for centuries to come. But Lacan ignores that the courtly lover, the knight who pursues the Lady through endless tasks and insurmountable challenges aimed at proving his love, was often a soldier of the Crusades, which pitted Christians against the darker peoples of the Middle East. This talk will trace the historical emergence of race as a category of difference developed in the Crusades while also tying the Lady to the culture of manners and gentility that emerged in the antebellum American south. The Lady will be read as the key figure facilitating a sublimation of libidinal drives that find their expression through culturally accepted atrocities of racism. Focusing finally on the practices of lynching black men that plagued especially the postbellum south, the talk will tie the charred body of the black lynch-victim to efforts to manifest for white postbellum subjects the Thing of the Real that the courtly lover and the racist lyncher equally pursue through sublimation of the (white) Lady.
Department of English
Simmons University
300 The Fenway
Boston Ma 02115
Sheldon.George@Simmons.edu
617-521-2211