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LITS2307 MODERN CRITICAL THEORY
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WEEK 3: PSYCHOANALYTIC
AESTHETICS / CRITICAL THEORY
Required Readings:
Lecture 1: Authorship
- Sigmund Freud "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming" [1908] (pp.
711-716 in Adams)
Lecture 2: Literary History
- Harold Bloom:
- The Anxiety of Influence [1973]: "Introduction: a
Meditation Upon Priority, and a Synopsis"
(pp. 1797-1804 in Leitch)
- A Map of Misreading [1975]: "The Dialectics of Poetic Tradition"
(pp. 1183-1189 in Adams)
Tutorial:
- Prepare the questions on Freud (see Week
1) and Jung (see Week 2).
Discuss this question: Compare and contrast Freud's views on the psyche with
Jung's.
Praxis:
- Marie Bonaparte The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: a
Psycho-analytic Interpretation [1933] (see extracts in The
Purloined Poe, ed. Muller and Richardson)
Recommended Readings:
- Elizabeth Wright "Modern Psychoanalytic Criticism" (in Modern
Literary Theory, ed. Ann Jefferson and David Robey)
PhilWeb:
Notes:
Questions:
Freud "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming":
- What analogies does Freud perceive between a literary work and a dream?
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How useful in this respect is an understanding of Freud’s concepts of condensation
and displacement?
- What is the nature of the relationship which exists between a literary
work and its author, according to Freud?
- How different is Freud’s view in
this regard from the conventional view of authorship (compare his view, for
example, to the Romantics')?
- What function does literature, according to Freud, perform, and how
does it accomplish this?
Bloom The Anxiety of Influence / A Map of Misreading:
- What do you understand by the term literary history?
- How does Bloom
conceptualise the progression of literary history?
- To what extent is Bloom's model of literary history indebted to Freud’s notion of the Oedipus Complex?
- Define the following terms as used by Bloom: the anxiety of influence;
belatedness; misreading; and revisionism.
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