Laurence
Rickels, editor
"Acting Out in Groups"
Tuesday, October 31 / 3 P.M. / McCune Conference Room
This event features Laurence Rickels discussing and signing copies of "Acting out in Groups," a volume of essays he edited for the University of Minnesota Press examining outrageous public behavior and what it can tell us about cultural and political change. The afternoon will conclude with his reading a selection from "The Vampire Lectures," a wild and wide-ranging "psycho-history" of the vampire that he authored for the same publisher.
The International Psychoanalytic Congress gathered in 1967 to define the clinical concept of "acting out." Thirty years later, our society, which once labeled those who exhibited excessive aggression as delinquent, celebrates outrageous public behavior. In Acting Out in Groups, writers, literary theorists, and cultural critics explore therapeutic descriptions of acting out in relation to the conduct condoned, even encouraged, on daytime TV talk shows, at political rallies, and in performance.
Through a deconstruction of "acting out," this collection seeks a new, performative style of critical discourse that incorporates the exuberance and intensity of acting out for analytical ends. Topics include the Jenny Jones murder trial; the response of psychoanalysts to the acclaimed documentary Crumb; the place of the Berlin Wall and other national symbols in German life; and the roles of aggression and discipline in childhood development.
"Acting out in Groups" features contributions by several members of the UCSB faculty who will be making appearances at this event: Julie Carlson (Department of English), Susan Derwin (Chair, Comparative Literature Program and Department of Germanic, Slavic, and Semitic Studies), and Elisabeth Weber (Department of Germanic, Slavic, and Semitic Studies). Laurence A. Rickels is professor of German literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he also teaches art and film studies. He is the author of Aberrations of Mourning (1988) and The Case of California (1991).
This event is co-sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, Department of Germanic, Slavic, and Semitic Studies, and Comparative Literature Program.
Courtesy of the UCSB Bookstore, copies of "Acting out in Groups" and "The Vampire Lectures" will be available for purchase and signing at the event.
