Scholarship and Writing

Book: Visual Perversity: A Re-Articulation of Maternal Instinct (Lexington Books, October 2004).

Synopsis
Luna explores the visual and its relationship to the acquisition of language and identity in four texts about the mother-child relationship: Bacchae by Euripides, "Christabel" by Coleridge, Philosophy in the Bedroom by de Sade, and Psycho by Hitchcock. Luna explores the tensions between such tropes as retention and liberation, observation and participation, perpetrator and victim, and love and hate. Not intended for light Mothers' Day reading, much of what Luna writes and examines is disturbing, exploring such ideas as what perversions, including dismemberment and murder, constitute the maternal gaze in culture, and the perversions the child is compelled to perpetuate on the mother to break free. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Book Review:
Daniel Punday: Narrative Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Narratology. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003 (forthcoming in Style, volume 39:3).

Article:
“Suicide Diaries and the Therapeutics of Anonymous Self-Disclosure” with Jeffrey Berman. Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society. 1:2 (Fall 1996), 63-75.

Reader/Reviewer
Mosaic: a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature