5AAE B016 Literature and Psychoanalysis

Level/Semester taught Convenors Teaching Arrangements Credit Value Assessment 2nd year module, Band 2, taught in Semester 1 Neil Vickers, Aruna Wittmann 1 hour lecture & 1 hour seminar weekly 15 credits One mid semester 1500 word essay (15%) ONE x 3500 word essay (85%), due examination period Formative, non-assessed work: One essay plan for discussion during office hours, seminar presentations MODULE OUTLINE: Description Psychoanalysis is a highly influential and contested form

of twentieth century discourse. This module is designed to introduce students to key Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalytic concepts and perspectives. By bringing these into dialogue with a wide range of literary texts, it will encourage students to consider how issues of unconscious motivation, sexuality and madness operate in and around different forms of writing. It will serve as a starting point for students to engage with existing psychoanalytic literary theory but will emphasise the close reading of foundational texts alongside literary works with the hope of generating new, mutually informed readings of both psychoanalysis and literature. In the first five seminars students will read Freud and be introduced to concepts such as hysteria, repression, defence, dream work, infantile sexuality, narcissism, neurosis and psychosis. In the second set of seminars students will read Klein, Winnicott, Bion, Lacan and Anna Freud, and consider how developments in psychoanalytic knowledge have led to both new concepts and the reconceptualisations of basic issues. The course will pay special attention to the role of the mother, playing and reality, the nature of psychotic anxiety, transference, unconscious language and the Oedipus complex. Each week we read a text by a psychoanalyst or psychoanalysts alongside a work of imaginative literature and we ask how the former might illuminate the latter. You will learn about a different psychoanalytic concept each week. Unusually, you wont be allowed to write about any of the literary works or films that we study on the course. Instead students are required to write an original piece of psychoanalytic criticism using the concepts and the understanding they acquire over the semester that the course runs. In this course it is essential that students contribute to seminars: that they share their views with other students and that when they dont understand something they say so. If your idea of participation in a seminar is hiding behind a laptop computer or writing down everything that everyone else says while saying nothing yourself, then this is not a course for you. Under no circumstances should you register for it. It can only work if people are open with each other. The course of readings for this seminar can be demanding and students may be asked at random to present on them. This too should be borne in mind before applying for a place on this course. Please note that there will be no opportunity to study or write about the ideas of Carl Jung on this course. Required books You should own a copy of Richard Wollheims Freud in the Fontana Modern Masters series or Anthony Storrs OUP Past Masters/Short Introduction to Freud. Storrs book is easier to understand but Wollheims is more comprehensive. Many of the secondary works we will discuss will be provided via the e-learning platform.

Lecture/Seminar programme (wks 1-5) The Freudian Background 1. Hysteria: Freud/Breuer: Studies on Hysteria/ Sylvia Plaths The Bell Jar 2. Dreams and the unconscious: Freud: On Dreams; Arthur Schnitzlers Dream Book (Traumnovelle) 3. Psychosexuality: Freud: Little Hans/Shakespeares The Tempest 4. Neurosis-Oedipus. Freud: The Wolf Man/Prousts Swanns Way 5. Narcissism-Psychosis: Freud: The Schreber case/Kafkas Metamorphosis (wks 6-10) Reading past Freud 6. Anna Freud Identification with the aggressor, the child and boundaries; Alice in Wonderland 7. Melanie Klein (Paranoid/schizoid - depressive positions): Hanna Segal, Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein (extracts)/John Clares poetry 8. Donald Winnicott (Playing and Reality): Transitional Objects / Wordsworth, The Two-Part Prelude (1798) 9. Wilfred Ruprecht Bion (Psychotic anxiety, container/contained): Bion, extract from Learning from Experience; Caesura; Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1937) 10. Jacques Lacan (Transference) Freud: Case history of Dora/Lacans essay on transference and the Dora case 10. Preliminary bibliography
Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane, In Dora's case: Freud--hysteria--feminism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976) Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York: OUP, 1973) Marie Bonaparte, The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe (1933) G. Deleuze and F. Guettarri, AntiOedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972); translated (London: Athlone, 1984) Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art: A Study in the Psychology of Artistic Imagination (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967) Stephen Heath, Psychopathia Sexualis: Stevenson's Strange Case', Critical Quarterly, 28 (1986), 93-108 Norman Holland, The Dynamics of Literary Response (New York: OUP, 1968) Luce Irigaray, Spculum de l'autre femme (Paris, 1974), translated by Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985) Melanie Klein, 'The Importance of Symbol Formation in the Development of the Ego', in Love, Guilt, and Reparation and Other Works (London: Virago, 1988) R. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis (1876) Ernst Kris, Psycho-Analytic Explorations in Art (London: Allen and Unwin, 1953) Julia Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader, edited by Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986) Jacques Lacan, crits: A Selection, translated by Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977); especially 'The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I'; 'The function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis'; 'The agency of the letter in the unconscious or reason since Freud'. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Alan Sheridan (London: Hogarth Press, 1977) J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (London: Hogarth Press, 1973) gives concise but thorough definitions of the central concepts Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, eds., (London: Macmillan, 1982) Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Methuen, 1985) Stuart Schneiderman, Jacques Lacan: The Death of an Intellectual Hero (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983) Hanna Segal, Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein (enlarged edition, London: Hogarth Press, 1973) Tony Tanner, Adultery and the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979) Anthony Wilden, System and Structure, second edition (London: Tavistock, 1980) Meg Harris Williams and Margot Waddell, The Chamber of Maiden Thought: Literary origins of the psychoanalytic model of the mind. (London: Routledge, 1991) D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974) Elizabeth Wright, Pyschoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice (London: Methuen, 1984) Slavoj iek The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989).