ENG 422 - Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Culture

Semester Hours: 4

Freud’s theories have generated no little amount of controversy, but his ideas have changed our culture in profound ways and remain relevant today. Many terms we use in everyday language, for instance-the unconscious, sublimation, the ego, superego and id come from Freud. During the 2004 presidential campaign, for example, while giving his concession speech in Iowa, Howard Dean let out a scream that one commentator described as coming straight from the id (you can hear the scream on You Tube). Freud’s influence reaches well beyond language. As Michael Roth has recently noted, “Our notions of identity, memory, sexuality, and most generally, of meaning have been shaped in relation to-and often in opposition to-Freud’s work.” So strong was Freud’s impact on art and literature in the first half of the twentieth century both here and abroad that it is hardly possible to conceive of a discussion of many modern writers, such as D. H. Lawrence or Sylvia Plath, without some knowledge of Freud. In the early part of the twentieth century, writers and artists were reading and discussing Freud’s seminal text The Interpretation of Dreams in salons across Europe and America. The American poet Wallace Stevens read it for the first time in the 1910s when he was part of the intellectual and artistic circle of Walter Arensberg in New York. In this course we will examine Freud’s major psychoanalytic theories, first through his own writings, and then in the works of later theorists and students of culture who have applied Freud’s ideas to a stunning array of cultural phenomena, from Nazi fascism, to horror, to fairy tales and contemporary cinema. We will discuss the relevance and application of psychoanalytic ideas to literary and film study, with a particular focus on the social and psychological constructions of masculinity and femininity and the impact of gender and sexual orientation on the production of cultural artifacts and, indeed, on culture itself. In addition to such foundational Freud texts as The Interpretation of Dreams, we will also discuss Freud’s later application of psychoanalysis to society. This course will particularly focus on the case study, which will not only include Freud’s own case studies, such as the “Wolf Man” and “Dora,” but also modern literary and film texts that were influenced by Freud’s work and can be viewed as literary or film case studies. These might include H.D.’s Tribute to Freud, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, Hitchcock’s Marnie, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and Nabokov’s Lolita.