Stephen King from Žižek’s perspective: an analysis of the problem of identity in ‘The Shining’

Abstract

This paper will study the problem of identity in the novel of the American horror writer Stephen King’s The Shining. I am going to analyse this novel paying special attention to that topic, and in order to do so I will use an important tool which is the conceptual apparatus of psychoanalysis. I will use Žižek’s How to Read Lacan and The Plague of Fantasies because these two works will be useful to understand certain concepts of psychoanalysis and to apply them to the analysis of the novel.