Postgraduate Course: Desire and Writing: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Criticism (ENLI11279)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | What does writing know about mental life? This course explores the history of psychoanalysis and its role in literary criticism. It asks what writing can tell us about desire, trauma, wishfulness, and melancholia, and what theories of psychological life can tell us about literature.
In this course we read key texts in the history of psychoanalysis and think about the contribution psychoanalytic criticism can make to our reading and understanding of aesthetics, politics, sexuality, race, and the postcolonial. |
| Course description |
What does writing know about mental life? This course explores the history of psychoanalysis and its role in literary criticism. It asks what writing can tell us about desire, trauma, wishfulness, and melancholia, and what theories of psychological life can tell us about literature.
The first half of the course reads key theoretical texts in the history of psychoanalysis as literature; students are asked to use their skills as critics to think about the style, rhetoric, and narrative form of works by Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, and others. The second half of the course uses this foundation to think critically about the role of psychoanalytic ideas in literary and critical theory, exploring questions of aesthetics, politics, sexuality, race, and the postcolonial.
While this course functions as a freestanding study of psychoanalysis and criticism, no specialist knowledge is assumed. We will work together to understand and analyse unfamiliar kinds of writing using familiar techniques of close reading, attending to context, style, and form.
This course will be of particular interest to students interested in modern and contemporary literature, mental health, gender and sexuality, race and the postcolonial, literature and medicine, creative writing, and the history and theory of literary criticism.
Indicative Reading List
Theory
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
Sigmund Freud, Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming
Sigmund Freud,Studies on Hysteria
Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia
Anna Freud, About Losing and Being Lost
Melanie Klein, Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
Donald Winnicott, Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena
Criticism
Ranjana Khanna, Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism
Mutlu Konuk Blasing, Lyric Poetry: The Pleasure and Pain of Words
Anne A. Cheng, The Melancholy of Race
Lee Edelman, No Future
Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject
Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope
Adam Phillips, Promises, Promises
Michelle Ann Stephens, Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Black Male Performer
Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | Students on LLC MSc programmes get first priority to this course. If you are not on an LLC programme, please let your administrator or the course administrator know you are interested in the course. Unauthorised enrolments will be removed. No auditors are permitted. |
Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2025/26, Not available to visiting students (SS1)
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Quota: 7 |
| Course Start |
Semester 2 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Seminar/Tutorial Hours 22,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
174 )
|
| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
Mid-semester: 1 x 2000-word critical and historical study of any of the works from the first half of the course (0% weighting, formative assessment).
End of semester: 1 x 4000-word essay on psychoanalytic approaches to literary criticism, using material from across the whole course. Essay questions will ask you to use a range of course materials to engage literary critical debates (100% weighting). |
| Feedback |
This course will present students with material likely to be unfamiliar and potentially challenging. As such, it takes pains to provide a high level of support and feedback throughout.
In-seminar presentations in this course will be accompanied by a) peer feedback and b) seminar leader feedback providing continuous verbal feedback to support knowledge and understanding.
This course will provide written formative feedback in response to the mid-semester essay.
Feedback will be returned in good time to inform the end-of-semester essay. |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the development of psychoanalytic theory
- Critically evaluate psychoanalytic methods and approaches to literary criticism
- Evaluate and synthesise psychoanalytic ideas and concepts
- Reflect critically on, and contribute to, debates in critical practice
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Reading List
Indicative essential reading: selections from
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
Sigmund Freud, Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming
Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria
Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia
Anna Freud, About Losing and Being Lost
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
Mutlu Konuk Blasing, Lyric Poetry: The Pleasure and Pain of Words (Princeton UP, 2007)
Anne A. Cheng, The Melancholy of Race (Oxford UP, 2001)
Lee Edelman, No Future (Duke UP, 2004)
Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject (Princeton UP, 1995)
Ranjana Khanna, Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Duke UP, 2003)
Melanie Klein, Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States*
Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope (Harvard UP, 2008)
Adam Phillips, Promises, Promises (Basic Books, 2001)
Michelle Ann Stephens, Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Black Male Performer (Duke UP, 2014)
Donald Winnicott, Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena
Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (Verso, 1989)
Recommended Reading
Sigmund Freud, The Complete Psychological Works ed. James Strachey*
Leo Bersani, Thoughts and Things (Chicago UP, 2015)
Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave (Chicago UP, 2009)
Mary Jacobus, The Poetics of Psychoanalysis: In the Wake of Klein (Oxford UP, 2005)
Melanie Klein, The Selected Melanie Klein ed. Juliet Mitchell (Hogarth Press, 1998)
Jacques Lacan, Ecrits ed. Bruce Fink (WW Norton, 2007)
Jean Laplanche, Essays on Otherness ed. John Fletcher (Routledge, 2005)
Jean Laplanche and J-B Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (Karnac, 2006)*
José Muñoz, Cruising Utopia (NYU Press, 2009)
Lyndsey Stonebridge and John Phillips (ed) Reading Melanie Klein (Routledge, 1998)
Donald Winnicott, The Family and Individual Development (Routledge, 2012)
Donald Winnicott, Playing and Reality (Routledge, 1971)
Slavoj Zizek, How To Read Lacan (Granta, 2011)
Suggested Further Reading
Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, Intimacies (Chicago UP, 2008)
Richard Bowlby, Fifty Years of Attachment Theory: The Donald Winnicott Memorial Lecture (Routledge, 2005)
Catherine Clémont, The Weary Sons of Freud (Verso, 2015)
Tom Eyers, Lacan and the Concept of the Real (Palgrave, 2012)
Shoshana Felman, Writing and Madness (Stanford UP, 2003)
Bruce Fink, Lacan To The Letter: Reading Ecrits Closely (U of Minnesota P, 2004)
John Forrester, Dispatches from the Freud Wars: Psychoanalysis and Its Passions (Harvard UP, 1997)
Jean Laplanche, Life and death in psychoanalysis (Johns Hopkins UP, 1985)
Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (U of Chicago P, 2010)
Catherine Liu, John Mowitt, Thomas Pepper, et al (eds) The Dreams of Interpretation (U of Minnesota P, 2007)
Lydia Marinelli and Andreas Mayer, Dreaming by the Book: A History of Freud's "the Interpretation of Dreams" and the Psychoanalytic Movement (Other Press, 2003)
Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (Basic Books, 2000)
Adam Phillips, Winnicott (Harvard UP, 1989)
Adam Phillips, Becoming Freud (Yale UP, 2014)
Elisabeth Roudinesco, Freud (Harvard UP, 2016)
Moustafa Safouan, Four Lessons of Psychoanalysis (Other Press, 2004)
Hanna Segal, Klein (Taylor & Francis, 2018)
Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Indiana UP, 1998)
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud: A Biography (Yale UP, 2008)
Slavoj Zizek, For They Know Not what They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (Verso, 2002) |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Critical understanding of concepts
Application of specialised skills and techniques of critical analysis
Presentation and communication of ideas on a professional level |
| Keywords | Psychoanalysis,trauma,gender,sexuality,queer theory,desire,theory,race,criticism,Freud,Klein,Bersani |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Alexander Freer
Tel:
Email: |
Course secretary | Mrs Lina Gordyshevskaya
Tel:
Email: |
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