Since the onset of her academic career in the 1970s, Shoshana Felman is best understood, in conjunction with Harvard University professor Barabara Johnson, as one of the leading proponents of the interweaving of psychoanalysis with literary and linguistic theory. Strongly influenced by French psychoanalytic critic Jacques Lacan, the scholar primarily responsible for rendering the theories of Sigmund Freud applicable to literary and linguistic analysis, Felman elucidates Lacan's sometimes difficult prose in an accessible manner while retaining all of its philosophical complexity. Felman questions many of the cultural assumptions associated with Freudian psychoanalytic theory and advocates Lacan, with his emphasis on linguistics and rhetoric, as the proper inheritor--and even replacement--of the Freudian tradition. Combining the psychoanalytic bent of Lacan with the deconstructive point of view of French literary theorist Jacques Derrida, Felman ultimately argues that what psychoanalysis calls into question is the reader's compulsion to achieve interpretive control over...