Earl G. Ingersoll convincingly argues that his study is a "return to Lacan," just as Lacan himself believed his own work to be a "return to Freud.".

In this succinct and accessible study of trope and gender in Dubliners, Ingersoll follows Lacan's example by returning to explore more fully the usefulness of the earlier Lacanian insights stressing the importance of language. Returning to the semiotic - as opposed to the more traditional psychoanalyticLacan, Ingersoll opts for the Lacan who follows Roman Jakobson back to early Freud texts in which Freud happened upon the major structuring principles of similarity and displacement.

Jakobson interprets these principles as metaphor and metonymy; Lacan employs these two tropes as the means of representing transformation and desire. Thus, psychic functions meet literary texts in the space of linguistic representation through the signifier: metaphor is a signifier for a repressed signified, while metonymy is a signifier that displaces another.