Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Advanced seminar in literary, critical, and/or cultural theory. May be repeated if a different topic is taught, though students who obtained credit for English 465W prior to Summer 2015 may not take this course for further credit. Students with credit for ENGL 465 may not take this course for further credit. Writing.

COURSE DETAILS:

COURSE TITLE: The Satanic Unconscious

This course takes a deep dive into psychoanalytic theory, primarily engaging with the work of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan as an inquiry into ideas of the unconscious, desire, the libido and anxiety. By way of grounding our work in the literary, we will also read Salman Rushdie's 1988 novel The Satanic Verses. We begin with Freud, reading key texts on an outline of psychoanalysis, negation, fetishism, mourning and melancholia, and hysteria. What we know, and why we do things, Freud tells us, is always a mystery: a mystery we can begin to understand precisely with the tools of literary criticism: reading and interpretation. Freud is in turn revised by Lacan, who argued that the unconscious is not individual but social, "the discourse of the other": we will read Lacan's écrits on time, on Edger Allen Poe, on metaphor and metonymy, and on the structures of desire. These concepts we will then "apply" in a reading of Rushdie's amazing, satirical, and troubling novel which was the subject of a fatwa, or death sentence in 1989, a "letter that arrived at its destination," if belatedly, with the stabbing attack on the author this past summer. What is it about literature that so troubles us, that gives rise to anxieties and murderous impulses? These are questions we will seek to answer and, along the way, learn about our own desires, wishes, aggressions and dreams.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

To better understand the relevancy of psychoanalysis to literary studies.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: