Justice Denied: Literary, Legal and Psychoanalytic Denial in the Age of Modernism

Abstract

This article triangulates three scenes in which law, psychoanalysis and literary modernism intersect, in order to excavate differing conceptions of the idea of denial. The article begins with a consideration of the landmark censorship case against the editors of The Little Review, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, for serialising James Joyce’s ‘obscene’ modernism; the article then shifts to the poet HD’s account of psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud; and finally reflects on how HD’s poetic practice re-articulates ideas around psychoanalysis, law and denial. Drawing on thinkers across the fields of poetics, psychoanalysis and critical legal studies, this article argues that the concept of denial indexes a fundamental tension between the theoretical frameworks of psychoanalysis and the law. This article further argues that HD’s poetic practice seeks a mode of writing which can both represent and resist such theoretical constraint and contradiction.