Dismantling Clinical Authority in Paterson

Abstract

This article explores how the relationship between William Carlos Williams and Marcia Nardi as represented by the "Cress" letters in Williams's modernist epic Paterson challenges the doctor/patient and normal/pathological binaries established by clinical practice. It argues that the dialectical tension between the masculine and feminine created by the hybrid construction of Paterson echoes psychoanalytic writings on femininity by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, reading the work in relationship to Michel Foucault's theory of the archive in The Order of Things .