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Literature And Psychoanalysis

Key information

  • Module code:

    5AAEB016

  • Level:

    5

  • Semester:

      Spring

  • Credit value:

    15

Module description

 

Psychoanalysis is a highly influential and contested form of 20th 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 lead to both new concepts and the re-conceptualisations of basic issues. The course will pay special attention to the role of the mother, playing/reality, the nature of psychotic anxiety, transference, unconscious language and the Oedipus complex.
Each week we read a text by a psychoanalyst alongside a work of imaginative literature and we ask how the former might illuminate the latter, and vice versa. You will learn about a different psychoanalytic concept each week. Unusually, you won’t 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 don’t 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. The course of readings for this seminar can be demanding and students will be asked to present on them. This too should be borne in mind before applying for this course. 

 

 

Assessment details

Coursework;presentation/s

1 x 3000 word essay (100%)

Teaching pattern

One hour lecture and one hour seminar, weekly

Subject areas

Department

Module description disclaimer

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Please note that modules with a practical component will be capped due to educational requirements, which may mean that we cannot guarantee a place to all students who elect to study this module.

Please note that the module descriptions above are related to the current academic year and are subject to change.