This thesis explores the ethical impact of literary narrative fictions on the reader. It does so by focusing mainly on the reading experience since one of the main claims of the thesis is that literary narrative fictions are co-products of the author and the reader. In that sense the aforementioned impact cannot be understood without taking into account the creative acts of the reader. The exploration is carried out by focusing on three scholars whose investigations on the problem of literary experience can be read as complementary works. In the first chapter I descriptively lay out Roman Ingarden's investigation on the ontological and structural character of the literary work of art along with his phenomenological inquiry into the cognition of this work. By examining his basic claims about the nature of the literary work of art and its cognition, I discuss the ontological incompleteness of these works which necessitates the active role of the reader in giving the work its final shape. In the second chapter I focus upon Wolfgang Iser's reader-response theory. Iser's theory goes parallel to Ingarden's in the sense that they both accept the openness of the work to the creative acts of the reader. Iser, however by his notions of depragmatization, negation and negativity suggest us a two-way traffic between the fictional work and the reader. Through the reading proses, by virtue of the negations and de-pragmatizations, the work invites the reader to reflect on the familiar norms it represents and suggest to her a new model to understand the real world. In this way, while giving a shape to the work, the reader is also shaped by it. The third chapter addresses the phenomenological hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur. By exploring his notion of “narrative identity” as a mediator between the ipse and idem identities, my aim is to show the influence of the literary fictional narratives in understanding the identity of the individual subject as a temporal, historical, and intersubjective being. It is only through this understanding that we can construe the subject in her ethical identity. I will also focus on Ricoeur's notions of “emplotment,” and “threefold mimesis,” which implies the active role of the reader in realizing the literary narrative fiction, so that I can reveal how fictional narratives enhance the notion of narrative identity.

This thesis explores how we might think the relation between psychoanalysis and the cultural field through Donald Winnicott's concept of the environment, seeking to bring the concept into dialogue with more “classical” strands of psychoanalytic theorizing. A substantial introduction sets out the rationale behind the thesis by reading Freud and Winnicott in relation to the “classic” and the “romantic” (Strenger 1989), or the “negative” and “positive” (Rustin 2001), in psychoanalytic thought. It goes on to outline the value of bringing these tendencies together in order to think the relationship between psychoanalysis, culture and change. The chapters which follow move from psychoanalysis as a “cultural cure” – a method and discourse drawing on and feeding into a broad conception of cultural life – towards a notion of “culture as cure” informed by Winnicott's theory of the environment. Chapter one examines Freud's refusal of the “culture”/ “civilization” distinction and considers what it means for the idea of a cultural cure. Chapter two considers whether Winnicott's thinking about “culture” ultimately prioritises the aesthetic over the political. Chapter three uses Aldous Huxley's Brave New World ([1932] 1994) to explore an analogy between totalitarianism, technology and maternal care. Chapter four turns to the series In Treatment (HBO 2008-) to think about the intersections of therapy and technology in terms of reflection and recognition. Chapter five employs Ian McEwan's Saturday (2005) as a means to reflect on the capacity of culture to cure. Ultimately, I suggest that social “cure” may require more than “good-enough” cultural forms and objects, but Winnicott's “romantic” theorization of the aesthetic, coupled with a “classic” attention to structures of power and oppression may offer a means of thinking the relationship between psychoanalysis and culture in potentially transformative ways.

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This thesis is concerned with developing a new approach to reading and thinking about culture (especially US culture), which I am proposing to call Luminol Theory. Luminol Theory is a textual reading strategy that draws on both psychoanalysis and depth reading. It reveals what has been occulted and it illuminates the contemporary United States as a crime scene. I argue for the singular importance of Luminol Theory as it provides a dystopian account of contemporary culture in the US. A culture that is haunted, that is characterised by injustice and brutality, and that reads bodies as disposable. I introduce luminol as an agent of forensic enquiry that excavates and illuminates narratives, particularly crime narratives, which have been erased. This interdisciplinary intersection of theory, forensic science, and literary criticism offers a specific, contemporary textual reading strategy. I situate Luminol Theory within its origins in feminism (with particular reference to Tiqqun's theory of the ‘Young-Girl'), psychoanalysis (with particular reference to Kristevan abject-analysis, queer theory, and the field of death studies), and depth reading strategies (working through Paul Ricoeur's ‘hermeneutics of suspicion' and Michel Foucault's ‘genealogy' and ‘archaeology'). Though it draws on each of these fields, Luminol Theory is a new contribution to contemporary literary criticism. The three critical chapters investigate the contemporary Unites States as a crime scene, moving through the exploratory steps that a forensic investigation might take. The first chapter opens with a reading of the crime scene itself by embedding Colorado crime fictions within the violent history of the state. The second chapter discovers artefacts at the scene, reading textual objects for hidden meanings and reading contemporary experimental fiction from the United States as apocalyptic material, through the lens of the Book of Revelation. Just as Revelation literally reveals the cultural anxieties of first millennium Christians and their fears of impending apocalypse so too Skin Horse by Olivia Cronk and Entrance to a Pageant where we all begin to Intricate by Johannes Göransson are apocalyptic texts for the third millennium. The final critical chapter approaches the body of the dead girl at the heart of the crime scene in order to discover the aesthetic coherence between death and femininity and the violence wrought interchangeably by sexual violence and capital. The fourth section of the thesis demonstrates Luminol Theory in practice. This collection of short fictions The Dead Girl Scrolls: Unearthed Apocalyptic Fictions is modelled on the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Dead Sea Scrolls were found serendipitously by shepherds in 1946 in the Qumran caves, West Bank. These scrolls contain a key to ancient languages, cultures, and narratives that were previously hidden. Later forensic analysis of the papyrus scrolls involved using UV light, a blue chemical glow that excavated layers of hidden narrative. By offering a secular version of these sacred texts, The Dead Girl Scrolls operates within a forensic imaginary; that is, it performs an empathetic and creative response to the secular aporia. It does this through offering dead women a central position that refuses to reify, objectify, or fetishise them or their bodies.