Max Cavitch

University of Pennsylvania, English, Faculty Member

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Inspiration and Insanity in British Poetry: 1825-1855, by Joseph Crawford

Victorian Studies, Sep 1, 2021

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine is an exciting new series that focuses on on... more Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine is an exciting new series that focuses on one of the most vibrant and interdisciplinary areas in literary studies: the intersection of literature, science and medicine. Comprised of academic monographs, essay collections, and Palgrave Pivot books, the series will emphasize a historical approach to its subjects, in conjunction with a range of other theoretical approaches. The series will cover all aspects of this rich and varied field and is open to new and emerging topics as well as established ones.

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Mark Twain, the Talking Cure, and Literary Form

American Literary History, Jun 16, 2023

The significance of Mark Twain’s Autobiography for the story of mental health in America has as m... more The significance of Mark Twain’s Autobiography for the story of mental health in America has as much to do with its form as with its content—an innovative autobiographical form that Twain crafted not only out of personal upheavals but also with acute insight into the depth psychology of his time.

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Curbside Quarantine: A Scene of Interspecies Mediality

Postmodern Culture

Safe, But Not Too Safe: Scenes From an Epistolary Romance

Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Apr 3, 2022

The following correspondence, incomplete and edited for length, was conducted between 2005 and 20... more The following correspondence, incomplete and edited for length, was conducted between 2005 and 2017—12 years out of the 15-year-long span of my almost entirely epistolary friendship with Philip Bromberg. With all the casualness and inadvertency of an email exchange, it nevertheless speaks—for us both—far more eloquently than anything I could write about the history of our friendship and about the various ways in which we shared our love of language with each other, across various distances and disciplinary boundaries.

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In the Interest of History

History of the Present

Psychoanalysis is often wrongly perceived to be uninterested in history. Yet, as the most compreh... more Psychoanalysis is often wrongly perceived to be uninterested in history. Yet, as the most comprehensive and sophisticated basis for the exploration of human consciousness, the field of psychoanalysis, from its inception to the present, has continued to offer unprecedented insights into how we perceive, record, and share the complexities of temporality. The aim of this article is to demonstrate, with the help of various works by Walter Benjamin—works in which his attunement with psychoanalytic concepts is of special interest—that all historical writing must yield, in one way or another, to the post-Freudian description of the unconscious and its role in elaborating historians’ interest in the historical as such.

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Everybody’s Autotheory

Modern Language Quarterly, 2022

This essay historicizes the emergence of the term autotheory as the signifier of a mode of autobi... more This essay historicizes the emergence of the term autotheory as the signifier of a mode of autobiographical writing and reading based primarily on intersubjective histories and relational ontologies. Instead of trying to define autotheory as a neatly circumscribed “subgenre” of autobiography, it argues that the term stands for a contemporary disturbance in the entire autobiographical field—a disturbance that, thanks in large part to the queer and feminist genealogies that inform it, helps disrupt the close association of autobiography and the prizing of ontological certainty and reorients the autobiographical pursuit of (self-)recognition away from the scripts of neoliberal individualism and toward the self’s more radical and formative intersubjectivity.

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Specters of Translation: Jacques Derrida, Safaa Fathy, and Nom à la mer

Oxford Literary Review, 2021

This essay explores the film collaborations of Franco-Egyptian filmmaker Safaa Fathy and Franco-M... more This essay explores the film collaborations of Franco-Egyptian filmmaker Safaa Fathy and Franco-Maghrebian philosopher Jacques Derrida, offering an extended reading of their court-métrage, Nom à la mer (2004)—a film about language, exile, and loss, made by a pair of wanderers both keenly interested in the spectral effects of translation as they haunt the filmic medium. Nom à la mer is a cinematic rendering of the French translation of Fathy's original, Arabic-language poem, recited by Derrida in voice-off as Fathy's camera focuses on a single, highly overdetermined site in a small Andalusian town. This essay reads the film as both an artefact of the pathos of translation and as a scene of valediction, played out by both collaborators on grounds simultaneously intimate and historical.

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3. Stephen Crane’s Refrain

American Literature's Aesthetic Dimensions, 2012

Contre-jour

PMLA, 2016

“Contre-jour” is the opening section of the coauthored book tourner les mots: au bord d&amp;#... more “Contre-jour” is the opening section of the coauthored book tourner les mots: au bord d&amp;#39;un film (2000), by the franco-maghrebian philosopher Jacques Derrida and the Franco-Egyptian filmmaker and poet Safaa Fathy. Tourner les mots is about their experience of film generally and, in particular, about their collaboration on Fathy&amp;#39;s 1999 film D&amp;#39;Ailleurs, Derrida, released in an English subtitled version as Derrida&amp;#39;s Elsewhere. One meaning of the word tourner in the book&amp;#39;s title is “to film.” But the word also shares with the English turn a wide range of meanings and associations, including “to turn,” “to revolve,” “to depend on,” “to shape or form,” “to consider,” and “to trope.” Thus Tourner les mots refers to cinematic practice (le tournage ‘filmmaking,’ ‘the shoot’) and to the relation between cinema and language (les mots ‘words’).

Stephen Crane’s Refrain

American Literature's Aesthetic Dimensions, 2012

“Do you love me?”: The question of the queer child of psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 2016

Queer children and LGBT youth often continue to find in the psychotherapeutic setting and the cli... more Queer children and LGBT youth often continue to find in the psychotherapeutic setting and the clinical literature an ill-prepared and even aversive reception. Suicidality among such children draws especially sharp attention to the need for better alternatives to current treatment modalities-the focus here is chiefly on the relational area, with its emphasis on the coupling norm and attachment theory-and, more broadly, for the further comprehensive development of queer-and LGBT-affirmative psychoanalytic theory and practice. In advocating for at-risk queer children, I also argue that the queer child is a meaningful transferential figure for the improved lifechances of psychoanalysis itself and for the enhanced role of psychoanalytic theory and practice in the realm of social transformation.

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Clericus and the Lunatick

The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 2013

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American Constitutional Elegy

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2010

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The Poetry of Phillis Wheatley in Slaveryâs Recollective Economies, 1773 to the Present

Race, Ethnicity and Publishing in America

Slavery and its metrics

The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Poetry

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Dickinson and the Exception

Smith/Companion, 2008

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Audience Terminable and Interminable: Anne Gilchrist, Walt Whitman, and the Achievement of Disinhibited Reading

Victorian Poetry, 2005

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Sex after death: Francois Ozon's libidinal invasions

Screen, 2007

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Review: The Fabrication of American Literature: Fraudulence and Antebellum Print Culture Lara Langer Cohen , The Fabrication of American Literature: Fraudulence and Antebellum Print Culture . Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press , 2012 . Pp. vi + 245. $59.95

Nineteenth-Century Literature, 2012

Interiority and Artifact: Death and Self-Inscription in Thomas Smith's Self-Portrait

Early American Literature, 2002

Since its restoration in , Thomas Smith's Self-Portrait (c. ) has become one of seventeen... more Since its restoration in , Thomas Smith's Self-Portrait (c. ) has become one of seventeenth-century New England's more familiar images (fig. ). 1 It has been widely reproduced and meticulously described. Ultraviolet fluorescence, X-radiography, and X-ray emissiography have revealed surprising visual details; and the tentative identification in  of two testamentary documents-Smith's will and an inventory of his estate-has lent substance to his otherwise scant biography. 2 Yet for all of this, Smith and his Self-Portrait continue to be served up corpse-cold, the painting's reception history shaped largely by connoisseurship and by the blander forms of Puritan foundationalism. 3 Seldom has it been entrusted with the power to exceed its antiquarian interest as a memorial of someone who was, or of a past that is presumed to have been. It is easy to see that the man in this painting cherished the world he knew. But the painting also reveals Smith's appetite for what he knows he will not live to become or to possess-for what, in the end, remains to be seen. He presents himself as someone to whom it matters how the world will continue to disclose itself, and as someone, furthermore, who can wield techniques of self-presentation as means of extending the consequences of this already extravagant care. 4 At the same time, Smith's Self-Portrait works to frustrate an insufficiently critical identification with its attractive figure of world-making by manifesting deep ambivalence about the ambition to be seen. As it cleaves to its viewer across the physical and conceptual spaces it opens up, Smith's Self-Portrait seems to shun as well as to invite the shared endeavor of looking. The skull, for example, featured so prominently in the left foreground of the painting is, as memento mori, a precautionary device; its iconographic function is apotropaic, to ward off attention to the visible world. { 

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