UPDATE: Psychoanalysis: The Modern(ist) Science (9/20/03; NEMLA, 3/3/04-3/7/04)

UPDATE: New email address (richard.heppner_at_sru.edu)

Psychoanalysis: The Modern(ist) Science
NEMLA March 2004 Pittsburgh

 To what extent are modernist literature and psychoanalysis compatible or
parallel practices? How does psychoanalysis influence/reflect modernist
literature, particular authors, forms, genres, movements? Can
psychoanalysis itself be considered modern(ist)?

 Given that Freud=B9s discovery of psychoanalysis and all of his writing on i=
t
are coextensive with the period often called literary modernism, and given
the shared concerns of psychoanalysis and modernist literature
(representation of the psyche, the influence of language on the mind,
non-traditional viewpoints and non-sane perspectives, the primacy of sex an=
d
sexuality in (un)consciousness etc.), this panel proposes to re-examine tha=
t
relationship from a literary critical perspective. The panel will ideally
approach the question from two directions simultaneously.
   The first will be to examine modernist authors for the influences
(conscious or unconscious) of psychoanalysis on their writing. This could
take the form of revisiting what authors (like D.H. Lawrence) say
specifically about psychoanalysis. Or, it could examine specific works for
their affinity or opposition to psychoanalytic principles: How does the
stream-of-consciousness of Woolf, Barnes, or Joyce suggest the existence of
the unconscious? Where do literary representations of mental illness (in
works by authors like T.S. Eliot and F. Scott Fitzgerald) agree with and
diverge from Freudian psychoanalytic ideas? Where do they, perhaps,
prefigure later (Lacanian, Kristevan, etc.) revisions of Freud?
 The second approach would examine the works of Freud himself for literary
influences and ideas. Freud was famously well read in the history of
literature, but the potential influences (conscious and unconscious) of
contemporary literature on his thought have not been fully examined. How
much does Freudian dream interpretation owe to the Symbolist movement? Wha=
t
does the "talking cure" gain from the written poetic practices of modernist
poets (or even from the later modern genre, the "talkie")? To what extent
can specific Freudian works, particularly case histories, be read as
modernist works of art? And, what is to be gained from such a reading, bot=
h
for understandings of modernism and of psychoanalysis?

Please send 1-2 page proposal for a twenty minute paper to:
Richard Heppner
richard.heppner_at_sru.edu

(If you already sent your proposal to rheppner_at_allegheny.edu, I have
received it, as this email address is still valid, for a while.)

Proposal Deadline: September 20, 2003

--=20
Richard Heppner, Ph.D.
Department of English
Slippery Rock, University

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Received on Sat Sep 06 2003 - 15:26:26 EDT