Hello all,
The following are a series of videos spanning the pop singer, Christina Aguillera's solo career.
Please watch them and consider the following:
- How is gender represented here? What are the messages about gender?
- How is power represented? Who has it? What gives it to them?
- What do you notice about the aesthetics of the video? (colour, tone, message)
- What might be the psychology of the artist in each video. I am asking here about the choices Aguillera is making in her art.
- How might that psychology relate to audience, power, gender, more?
Feel free to look into the basic history of her career.
Please arrive ready to discuss the above.
NOTES:
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
Thanks everyone.
Ms. S
