Playing Dirty

Playing Dirty is full of dirty jokes. Arguing that the early modern excremental body is in many ways an erotic body, Will Stockton-with humor and dry wit-reads psychoanalytic theory through early modern comedies, claiming that it is helpful, rather than inimical, to the project of historicizing the body. Noting that psychoanalysis has traditionally operated in a paranoid framework that relentlessly produces evidence of the same "truths," Stockton turns to a minority practice in psychoanalysis-associated with Jean Laplanche-to develop a more "playful" analytic for literary studies.