@inbook{10.3138/9781442698758.14,
 ISBN = {9780802099440},
 URL = {http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3138/9781442698758.14},
 abstract = {The basic principle of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory that ‘The unconscious is structured like a language’ indicates the relevance of psychoanalytic theory to literary analysis and to aesthetic evaluation and judgment. The unconscious, like literary language, is organized by the structures of rhetoric. The tropes of classical rhetoric operate on signifiers, that is, words, letters, and phonemes, give form to unconscious discourse: metaphor, or the substitution of signifiers; metonymy, or the contiguity of signifiers; and irony, or the compatibility of contradictory signifieds or meanings for a single signifier.¹ If the unconscious is structured like a discourse, then psychoanalytic practice, like literary},
 author = {JANET THORMANN},
 booktitle = {On the Aestheticsof Beowulf and Other Old English Poems},
 pages = {209--226},
 publisher = {University of Toronto Press},
 title = {The Subject of Language: A Psychoanalytic Approach to the Aesthetics of Old English Poetry},
 year = {2010}
}