Module ENGL3831: Literary Psychoanalysis

Department: English Studies

ENGL3831: Literary Psychoanalysis

Prerequisites

• Successful completion of ENGL2011 Theory and Practice of Literary Criticism.

Corequisites

• None.

Excluded Combination of Modules

• None.

Aims

• This module focuses on the case study as an evolving genre of literary writing and investigates the intersections of psychological suffering and aesthetic form throughout the history of psychoanalytic thinking.
• It introduces students to questions of narrative time, character, critical investigation, emotional transference and linguistic slippage as foundational to both literature and psychoanalysis.
• It surveys the history of the psychoanalytic case study, running from the late nineteenth century to the current day.
• It attends to the writerly self-consciousness of the case study form in order to interrogate how suffering bodies enter stories, how presuppositions attach to these bodies, and how bodies become engaging characters.
• It asks how stories of illness end, or refuse to end, how they are interpreted and contested, and how the reader comes to be implicated in processes of clinical and cultural diagnosis.
• It considers the relational and transferential dynamics of the clinic as a scene of writing and reading where fantasy and reality are always intertwined.

Content

• Each week students will be invited to read a primary case study or clinical scene. This might include, for example: reading for narrative time and trauma in Freud’s early clinical histories in Project for a Scientific Psychology and Studies on Hysteria; reading for sexuality in the clinic in Freud’s ‘Fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria’ [‘Dora’]; reading for paranoia in Freud’s ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’ [‘The Wolf Man’]; reading the clinic as a site of decolonising struggle in Fanon’s, ‘Colonial War and Mental Disorders’; reading the psychopathology of the family in R.D. Laing’s and A Esterson’s Sanity, Madness and the Family; reading for gender in Robert Stoller’s Sex and gender: On the Development of Masculinity and Feminity; reading the neurological self in Oliver Sacks’, The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat; and reading psychoanalysis and its televisual frame in the TV series In Treatment (Producer: Rodrigo Garcia). Each clinical or case reading will be thematically and theoretically framed. Students will be encouraged to read works of clinical analysis and re-interpretation by G Deleuze, G Bateson, J Riviere, M Milner, H Cixous and others, and to consider how gender studies, critical race theory, studies of decolonization and media studies intersect with the work of psychoanalysis.

Learning Outcomes

• Participants will learn about the history of psychoanalysis as well as the broader disciplinary contours of modern psychiatric power, anti-psychiatry and the discourse of madness.
• They will be invited to consider important questions of gender, sexuality and cultural difference as they enter the psychoanalytic frame.
• They will be trained to appreciate the therapeutic impulse of reading as well as the critical resources of hermeneutic suspicion: what does it means to sit with another person’s suffering, to listen to it and empathise with it, but also to strategically refuse to empathise with it – to insist that the linguistic and gestural forms through which the suffering emerges continue to be significant?
• The module ends by considering the enduring importance of the psychoanalytic case study to popular science and general culture.

• Students studying this module will develop:
• mature critical skills in the close reading and analysis of texts
• an ability to demonstrate knowledge of a range of texts and critical approaches
• mature and informed awareness of formal and aesthetic dimensions of a variety of literatures and ability to offer cogent analysis of their workings in specific texts
• enhanced sensitivity to the generic conventions of the case study and to the shaping effects on communication of historical circumstances, and to the affective power of language
• an enhanced ability to articulate and substantiate an imaginative response to intellectual and literary histories
• an ability to articulate knowledge and understanding of concepts and theories relating to psychoanalytic and literary studies
• confident skills of effective communication and argument
• enhanced awareness of conventions of scholarly presentation, and bibliographic skills including accurate citation of sources and consistent use of scholarly conventions of presentation
• an informed command of a broad range of vocabulary and an appropriate critical terminology
• a mature and informed awareness of literary writing as a medium through which values are affirmed and debated

• Students studying this module will develop:
• a confident and mature capacity to analyse critically
• an enhanced ability to acquire complex information of diverse kinds in a structured and systematic way involving the use of distinctive interpretative skills derived from the subject
• enhanced competence in the planning and execution of essays
• an enhanced capacity for independent thought and judgement, and ability to assess the critical ideas of others
• skills in critical reasoning
• an ability to handle information and argument in an informed and critical manner
• information-technology skills such as word-processing and electronic data access information
• strong organisation and time-management skills

Modes of Teaching, Learning and Assessment and how these contribute to the learning outcomes of the module

• Seminars: encourage peer-group discussion, enable students to develop critical skills in the close reading and analysis of texts, and skills of effective communication and presentation; promote awareness of diversity of interpretation and methodology
• Consultation session: encourages students to reflect critically and independently on their work o Independent but directed reading in preparation for seminars provides opportunity for students to enrich subject-specific knowledge and enhances their ability to develop appropriate subject-specific skills.
• Typically, directed learning may include assigning student(s) an issue, theme or topic that can be independently or collectively explored within a framework and/or with additional materials provided by the tutor. This may function as preparatory work for presenting their ideas or findings (sometimes electronically) to their peers and tutor in the context of a seminar.
• Coursework: tests the student's ability to argue, respond and interpret, and to demonstrate subject-specific knowledge and skills such as appreciation of the power of imagination in literary creation and the close reading and analysis of texts; they also test the ability to present word-processed work, observing scholarly conventions. In individual Special Topics, the essay may, where appropriate to the subject, take an alternative form, such as 'creative criticism'.
• Feedback: The written feedback that is provided after the first assessed essay allows students to reflect on examiners' comments, giving students the opportunity to improve their work for the second essay.

Teaching Methods and Learning Hours

Summative Assessment

Formative Assessment:

Before the first assessed essay, students have an individual 15 minute consultation session in which they are entitled to show their seminar leader a sheet of points, relevant to the essay and to receive oral comment on these points. Students may also, if they wish, discuss their ideas for the second essay at this meeting.

■ Attendance at all activities marked with this symbol will be monitored. Students who fail to attend these activities, or to complete the summative or formative assessment specified above, will be subject to the procedures defined in the University's General Regulation V, and may be required to leave the University