- Below you will find notes from today's class.
- Be aware too that the vote on the novel renderedThe Power Of One by Bryce Courtenay Sign yours out now!
- Here is a link to the video we looked at (it is not uniformally useful but the first eleven minutes are) video
NOTES:
Sigmund Freud
Psychoanalytic criticism
builds on Freudian theories of psychology. While we don't have the room here to
discuss all of Freud's work, a general overview is necessary to explain
psychoanalytic literary criticism.
Freud asserted that
people's behavior is affected by their unconscious: "...the notion that
human beings are motivated, even driven, by desires, fears, needs, and
conflicts of which they are unaware..."
Freud believed that our
unconscious was influenced by childhood events. Freud organized these events
into developmental stages involving relationships with parents and drives of
desire and pleasure
"...repression
doesn't eliminate our painful experiences and emotions...we unconsciously
behave in ways that will allow us to 'play out'...our conflicted feelings about
the painful experiences and emotions we repress" (15). To keep all of this
conflict buried in our unconscious, Freud argued that we develop defenses:
selective perception, selective memory, denial, displacement, projection,
regression, fear of intimacy, and fear of death, among others.
Id, Ego, and Superego
(see video)
Freud and Literature
Typical
questions:
- How do the
operations of repression structure or inform the work?
- Are there
any oedipal dynamics - or any other family dynamics - are work here?
- How can
characters' behavior, narrative events, and/or images be explained in
terms of psychoanalytic concepts of any kind (for example...fear or
fascination with death, sexuality - which includes love and romance as
well as sexual behavior - as a primary indicator of psychological identity
or the operations of ego-id-superego)?
- What does
the work suggest about the psychological being of its author?
- What might
a given interpretation of a literary work suggest about the psychological
motives of the reader?
- Are there
prominent words in the piece that could have different or hidden meanings?
Could there be a subconscious reason for the author using these
"problem words"?
https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/72
