Deborah Levy:
The Psychopathology of the Doppelgänger: Creating a Twinned Self in Fiction
Deborah Levy will discuss her research for a new novel that will interrogate an encounter with an apparently identical human double. Exploring psychoanalytic ideas and literary strategies to engage with the uncanny, Levy will unfold her approach to doubling, split selves, wayward selves, contested identities, alter-egos, shadows, avatars, being in two minds, and speaking through an other.
Deborah Levy, novelist, essayist, poet and Fellow with the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, is the author of six novels, including “Swimming Home” and “Hot Milk”, both shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Her two acclaimed “living autobiographies” on gender politics and philosophy, “Things I Don’t Want to Know” and “The Cost of Living”, are being translated across the world, and she is the author of a collection of stories, “Black Vodka”. Levy is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has recently written the script for a short film, “Freud’s Lost Lecture”, directed by Jane Thorburn, to be screened in Paris and London this year.