ENH3175 - Reading Otherwise: Literature, Gender, Psychoanalysis

Leader: Rose Lucas

Offered

Not offered in 2007

Synopsis

This unit will provide students with a theoretical framework within which to undertake a psychoanalytic reading of a number of texts, across a number of genres. This will involve consideration of certain key concepts within psychoanalytic theory, accessed primarily through the reading of a number of essays by Freud and Lacan. Psychoanalysis will then be used as a primary lens for reading. This involves the consideration of texts which overtly make use of the ideas and/or methodologies of psychoanalysis- such as Woolf's Mrs Dalloway or poet Anne Sexton's "To Bedlam, and Part Way Back" - in addition to a wider range of differently motivated texts - eg crime fiction or the Hollywood melodrama.

Objectives

Students completing this unit have gained:

1. Knowledge and a working understanding of selected psychoanalytic texts.
2. Knowledge of a broad range of cross-genre literary texts.
3. Further skills of literary analysis, enriched by the application of certain psychoanalytic concepts.
4. Insight into the critical and theoretical debates concerning the production of a gendered subjectivity within literary texts.
5. The necessary skills for contributing to critical discussion and producing scholarly written argument.

Assessment

Seminar participation: 10%
Class paper (to be subsequently handed in as a 2500 word essay): 50%
In-class Test (1.5 hours): 40%

Contact hours

2 hours (1 x 2 hour seminar) per week and occasional 2 hour screenings

Prerequisites

A first-year sequence in literary studies or equivalent.