Literature and Psychoanalysis

Literature and Psychoanalysis is a Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies class taught by Mary Russo.

Course Description
This course examines the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature by focusing on Freud's concept of the "uncanny" as it appears in his famous essay of the same name and as it emerges in literary examples in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Freud himself drew on the work of E.T.A. Hoffman, whose "Sandman" features mysterious strangers, a mechanical doll, family romance, and madness. In the course of the semester, literary texts will include Hoffman's story, The Sandman, Dostoevsky's The Double, Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and selected fiction by Angela Carter. In addition, we will examine the aesthetic categories related to the uncanny, such as the grotesque, the horrific and the abject and trace the development of genres like the gothic and the ghost story in literature and film.

Learning Goals

 * Presenting
 * Reading
 * Writing