Ellie Ragland

University of Missouri | Mizzou · Department of English

Jacques Lacan (1901–1981), born in Paris France, changed the course of thought in psychoanalysis and philosophy in his teaching of yearly Seminars from 1952 to 1981. Replacing Jean-Paul Sartre as the reigning intellectual of his day, Lacan taught analysts and worldwide intellectuals that the basis of thought lies in language, identifications, desir...

Winter’s Bone, a film by Debra Granik (2010), tells the story of Ree Dolly’s refusal to give up on finding her father who has gone missing from the community of his mountain clan. Her kinfolk all tell her to be quiet and stop her search. She continues, nonetheless, sustaining a severe beating from the women. She wants to save her home which her fat...

In this study I argue that Marguerite Duras's prose is so haunting because it uses in a minimalist way the objects that Lacan called the objects-cause-of-desire: the voice, the gaze, the breast, the faeces, the (imaginary) phallus, the phoneme, the urinary flow, and the nothing. In Moderato Cantabile she uses the voice. The two desperate protagonis...

I shall argue that the Islamic veil is a symptom of the question, “What is Woman?” As a symptom of male phallic castration, the veil works as “non-delivered meaning,” one definition Jacques-Alain Miller gives of the symptom. As a signifier of jouissance, the veil hides that which is impossible to say and leads to the object a, which refers to a jou...

In The Logic of Sexuation, Ellie Ragland offers a detailed account of Jacques Lacan's theories of gender, sexuality, and sexual difference. Exploring Lacan's rereading (via Aristotle) of Freud's major essays on feminine sexuality, Ragland demonstrates that Lacanian theory challenges essentialist notions of gender more effectively than do current de...

In "Essays on the Pleasures of Death" Ellie Ragland demystifies "Lacan's return to Freud," explaining the transformation Freud's psychoanalytic theories have undergone at Lacan's hands. Clarifying the differences between basic Freudian and Lacanian concepts that have mistakenly been taken to mean the same thing, Ragland shows Lacan as a psychoanaly...

Refutes the theory that students automatically learn to think more openly via a decentered pedagogical transference relation, a relation "supposed" to put the teacher/master, student/slave hierarchy into question. Argues that neither learning nor thinking can be adequately explained by equating language to writing, or text to narrative. (TB)

This article is an analysis of the film La Double Vie de Véronique; (The Double Life of Véronique; de la Fuente & Kieslowski, 1991) from a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective. It explores significant differences in the experiences of two women, roles played by the same actress, presented in the film as identical in appearance, living in different p...

The purpose of this study was to determine the repeatability of high-frequency, bone conduction thresholds and to increase the data base concerning high-frequency, bone conduction threshold levels. Bone conduction thresholds were obtained on 30 subjects having normal, low, and mid frequency (0.25 to 8 kHz) hearing thresholds within and across five...

Lacan viewed language as playing a profound and multivalent role in the structuring of human perception. Prior to linguistic syntax, an identificatory (Imaginary) semantics subjectivizes the representation of reality, rooting perception in an unconscious network of imagistic and phonetic meanings. Lacan's “symbols” (or signifiers) are later dispers...

This article seeks to document and understand the psychological effects of involuntary job loss on untenured professors. Theoretical models, clinical observation, personal letters, and interviews point up the existence of a widespread mourning phenomenon among abruptly terminated academics, a pervasive response that has only been significantly meas...

contend that the . . . divide between the sexes, a difference which exists only as an effect of the real [Jacques] Lacan called the phallus, not as a biological or moral necessity / Ragland-Sullivan takes Lacan's [psychoanalytic] picture of the unconscious—an effect produced by the culturally imposed divide between the sexes—to mean that the mascul...