tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91135732512044215672024-03-18T22:47:55.461-04:00English 271: Psychoanalysis and LiteratureProfessor Estevezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16089916647553501445noreply@blogger.comBlogger30125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9113573251204421567.post-84638344926590340682015-12-07T19:05:00.001-05:002015-12-07T19:05:23.709-05:00Family Romances<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj50Fx-F_qLj4SCzp260ERgKoQv3Ic-Ae5F2KF-_4Bm6A03zE86ie2xYWBtLprpI5GKxXIRJcUJWGX8fMyps960VMWVLnI-buS6VM1Uq-Ej3YBCugMFIOzwgSbpkmujPOymIHK8LjN9auU/s1600/yellowstone2adjusted+copy.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5685229204081958114" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj50Fx-F_qLj4SCzp260ERgKoQv3Ic-Ae5F2KF-_4Bm6A03zE86ie2xYWBtLprpI5GKxXIRJcUJWGX8fMyps960VMWVLnI-buS6VM1Uq-Ej3YBCugMFIOzwgSbpkmujPOymIHK8LjN9auU/s400/yellowstone2adjusted+copy.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 282px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVzveR6uz86AtKpSLqwkFbwYPATQwYZZ-k95hG9Siosb2RQN7EhzqHI6jSn7Nv3T5u1UVDTVAX53I34H8KKTM-1DVTmNLFJ9YyB8B9pZi62HaLb0IQUXX1x0iCIPlx9y987lL_4s9YYXk/s1600/family+copy+2.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5685228734729692962" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVzveR6uz86AtKpSLqwkFbwYPATQwYZZ-k95hG9Siosb2RQN7EhzqHI6jSn7Nv3T5u1UVDTVAX53I34H8KKTM-1DVTmNLFJ9YyB8B9pZi62HaLb0IQUXX1x0iCIPlx9y987lL_4s9YYXk/s400/family+copy+2.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 280px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRphiEUbVnk9mybY7d0Tg4yMYVgjTfmp_sRztVYQZdTjLt_7k8alo_n-DPGJZrNgODZfgCmrwp6OdYEmguIPZxpH7AgGKjTHx6GLshz6w3F9KGD7P9UVnybgIT83R2ipZeCS68lhB3PLU/s1600/5+copy.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5685228631351563634" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRphiEUbVnk9mybY7d0Tg4yMYVgjTfmp_sRztVYQZdTjLt_7k8alo_n-DPGJZrNgODZfgCmrwp6OdYEmguIPZxpH7AgGKjTHx6GLshz6w3F9KGD7P9UVnybgIT83R2ipZeCS68lhB3PLU/s400/5+copy.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 275px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></a><br />
In these last few weeks of the semester as we talk about Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir, <span style="font-style: italic;">Fun Home</span>, I want you to think about how the work we've accomplished in class can be used to better understand the role of narrative in our own lives. Freud's use of the Oedipus myth and his attention to children's literature and fantasies in "The Family Romance," give us two narrative structures through which to read not only literary works, like <span style="font-style: italic;">Fun Home</span>, but our own lives as well.<br />
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If I had to boil down the relation between Freud's work and literature into the simplest formula it would be this: Freud teaches us once again about the central human importance of reading and writing narrative. Everything that humans communicate in any way in language is "telling a story" (and this goes for conscious and unconscious thought as well). In a very real way, the contents of your head are "just stories," that is, narratives constructed in interaction with your environment and meaningful to others. There is no "outside" of narrative if you are a homo sapiens; in fact there is currently some really good work in neuroscience on how the evolution of our brains has produced the necessity for narrative in order to construct a time-bound sense of our environment and cause-and-effect rationality.<br />
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As I've said in class, I find the Freudian Oedipal Complex and the Family Romance to be intimately connected. One is the story of the child's struggle to negotiate authority and eventually capitulate to its demands. But the other speaks of the creative ways we deal with those necessary compromises, finding ways to sublimate our frustrations, empower ourselves and even, on occasion, triumph. <br />
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While thinking about the Family Romance and the various ways we rewrite the scripts of our lives through fantasy and fiction, I was reminded of an episode of the radio program, <span style="font-style: italic;">This American Life</span> that has always struck me as a poignant example of the very real power of "fiction." It is the story of two siblings who grew up in a house controlled by a domineering and crazy mother. While the brother was allowed all manner of freedom in his coming and going, the sister, because she was a girl, was under constant restriction, scrutiny, and accusation. To gain a measure of freedom the two siblings constructed a fictional family they told their mother that they were babysitting for. Because of their mother's particular blend of paranoia, semi-agoraphobia and insanity, they were able to bring off a complex deception based on the creation of an elaborate fantasy family, one which was both a substitute for, and a means of surviving, the family they lacked. <br />
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One of the moving things about this episode is hearing it told in the siblings own voices, especially the sister's, in whose tones one can still hear the joy of those long ago freedoms. You can <a href="http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/175/babysitting">listen to the audio here</a>, it is Act Three of the Babysitting Episode (you can also purchase individual episodes of TAL on iTunes to download to your mp3 player). You can also read a transcript of the episode <a href="http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/175/transcript">here</a>, again scroll down to Act Three.<br />
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So when you start thinking about your final paper, I want you to also feel free to think about your own family narratives. Freud's work suggests that there is a certain narrative universality to family life. The particulars of Alison Bechdel's story are different from mine, but there is certainly much I can recognize in the subtle power struggles, the narrative gaps of family secrets, and the eventual need to put one's parents into proper perspective: neither gods nor monsters.Professor Estevezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16089916647553501445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9113573251204421567.post-16899428458950214652015-12-07T19:03:00.000-05:002015-12-09T10:06:02.741-05:00Fun Home as Family Romance: Final Paper<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwDJPpJAcAk8dzQWgqPXQvk5RQPBMKeBt_xOPPkzKfWU4jXG1K6X4Zi_gXSsCOo1tMcz1AtQykBUZvfGLD1XVc_jGJTkz39_qtUwU2ypOMI6D3PBQ_kCc0Mo0knc5pfhpd22wPzJ8JnJ4/s1600-h/1psych+babysitter+cache+life.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277203960877232898" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwDJPpJAcAk8dzQWgqPXQvk5RQPBMKeBt_xOPPkzKfWU4jXG1K6X4Zi_gXSsCOo1tMcz1AtQykBUZvfGLD1XVc_jGJTkz39_qtUwU2ypOMI6D3PBQ_kCc0Mo0knc5pfhpd22wPzJ8JnJ4/s320/1psych+babysitter+cache+life.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 214px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 320px;" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUbEc_pN03WJ9i1mHVQjKlBMXrBtKyQzfpvePrHQKhh2-xOe58WdkBSa2EdqM9WjwnPBuO9-cQTh4d_vBKPdbEZnW8Po13wLVjWFt9wsnTLgXi69_x4Hp0PYiENFcoVa87Wt-nvjNpXYw/s1600-h/1child+act+out+psych+life+archive.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277203559838173618" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUbEc_pN03WJ9i1mHVQjKlBMXrBtKyQzfpvePrHQKhh2-xOe58WdkBSa2EdqM9WjwnPBuO9-cQTh4d_vBKPdbEZnW8Po13wLVjWFt9wsnTLgXi69_x4Hp0PYiENFcoVa87Wt-nvjNpXYw/s320/1child+act+out+psych+life+archive.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 198px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 320px;" /></a><br />
"But in the tricky reverse narration that impels our entwined stories, he was there to catch me when I lept."<br />
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Alison Bechdel's <span style="font-style: italic;">Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic</span>, is brimming with recognizable elements from nearly every text we've read this semester. It's a veritable index of Freudian particulars. We've got the intense devotion to lexical explication (i.e., looking things up in the dictionary) that we remember from Freud's essay on "The Uncanny," we've got dreams and dream analysis, Freudian slips, unreliable memories riddled with gaps and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacuna">lacunae</a>, recursive narrative structures, doubles, multiple returns of multiple repressions and above all, The Family as the harrowing forge of individual identity.<br />
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For the final paper I'd like you to discuss <span style="font-style: italic;">Fun Home</span> as a <span style="font-style: italic;">family romance</span>. In other words, how does Freud's essay illuminate our understanding of the family dynamic examined in this memoir? In Freud's terms, the family romance is a way of talking about the stories through which children negotiate their necessary separation from their parents. Much like the Freudian concept of Oedipal conflict, children necessarily struggle with both identification and rejection of parental authority; indeed the Oedipal struggle is premised on the death of the father. But how do you kill a father that is already dead?<br />
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In thinking about <span style="font-style: italic;">Fun Home</span> as an active exercise of memory and narrative, it's important to consider that Bechdel has spoken about her work as not only a story about identity, but also a story about becoming an artist, an endeavor which also involves a negotiation with the influence of her father.<br />
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You can organize your use of Freud in this discussion any way you choose. I do, however, ask that your discussion include some commentary on the book's narrative structure: the relationship between text and image. <br />
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Due: Monday, December 21<br />
Length: 4 pagesProfessor Estevezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16089916647553501445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9113573251204421567.post-59333952517234985852015-12-07T12:41:00.002-05:002015-12-07T12:41:15.473-05:00Reading Readings of H<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCWh2dpvr5GjMSkZkwGahooIi_tNsR77FrO_LLcfdnj7v5BLr8wIARWzcxUT8Y_FQRBkvOJs199X_xN2kql6-HwsSc8NiQ_q9qFMEqxsROmQh-pvqqxuMOZLhg7LtZDH_B_gYYyHTpWBE/s1600-h/drhay09.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277127553844667554" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCWh2dpvr5GjMSkZkwGahooIi_tNsR77FrO_LLcfdnj7v5BLr8wIARWzcxUT8Y_FQRBkvOJs199X_xN2kql6-HwsSc8NiQ_q9qFMEqxsROmQh-pvqqxuMOZLhg7LtZDH_B_gYYyHTpWBE/s320/drhay09.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 220px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 320px;" /></a>Some quick, pre-class feedback on the last round of papers for those waiting nervously.<br />
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As a whole it was a stronger group of papers than the first round. Students who were having trouble with development and organization improved in those areas. And pretty much across the board, everyone attempted analyses of the kind required by a non-conventional narrative like <span style="font-style: italic;">H</span> with detailed attention given to the narrative's latent information and assumptions. <br />
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In no particular order, these are some individual bits of insight and interpretation that I thought were especially solid and useful. You may recognize some (in some cases many) of your own points here:<br />
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1) The "bicycle incident" is probably the most revealing example of the limitations of the "authorities" (parents, doctor, camp directors and counselors) point of view. From their angle, Benjamin is irrational and violent, a potential threat to others. From Benjamin's angle, the context of the incident is explained as well as Benjamin's remorse and realization that he acted wrongly. Here we also see a pattern consistently reproduced: Benjamin's actions are seen <span style="font-style: italic;">in isolation</span> and not <span style="font-style: italic;">in context</span> by those in authority over him. <br />
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2) Mr. and Mrs. Sherman are almost diametrical opposites: distant vs. too involved, cold vs. too emotional, one insisting that Benjamin "grow up," the other desiring that he remain her little boy. They are similar however in their lack of any sense of responsibility for Benjamin's "problems." <br />
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3) As two students pointed out, Mr. Sherman's never writing to Benjamin directly is symbolic of his inability to <span style="font-style: italic;">address</span> the situation, i.e. his letters are not "addressed" to the right person. One paper specifically compared Mr. Sherman with the absent Master in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Turn of the Screw,</span> another figure who avoided communication by letters and whose absence powerfully influenced the actions of the other characters. Another paper brought in Freud's essay on the "fort/da" game as a way to make sense of Elliot and Elliottown as a means to deal with this parental absence---like that game, the Elliottown fantasy gave Benjamin a sense of control and a way to, as one student said, "write his own story," a story much different than his father's.<br />
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4) Benjamin's progress at camp is seemingly invisible to his parents. Can his parents even "see" Benjamin or only their own desires for him? Several students noticed that everything positive about his camp experience is overlooked by his parents, in particular his friendship with Amelia. Since they expect him to make friends with other boys, they are oblivious to the one possible friend he does make. <br />
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5) Elliottown is a compensatory fantasy. One of the things it provides that is glaringly missing from Benjamin's "real life" is trust. He cannot trust his parents: after telling him he can decide if Elliot stays at camp, they take her away anyway, Mr. Sherman listens in surreptitiously on Benjamin's phone calls with his mother, Benjamin agrees to go into the hospital, but obviously hasn't had the conditions of his release made clear to him, and so forth. One paper pointed out how Elliottown provides Benjamin with a sense of importance and meaning: he is a capable emissary from another world, sent to observe and make conclusions about Earth, as well as being some kind of "expert" able to help solve various Elliottown problems. Within the Elliottown world, Benjamin has status as a competent leader and advisor. Another paper pointed out how important Elliot was to helping Benjamin construct an independent identity, independent of his parents and their version of a "perfect son." And many students made the point that most of the adults seem oblivious to Benjamin's sheer creativity. Whatever the ultimate positive/negative effects are, Benjamin's fantasies are deeply creative and maybe this was lost even on his doctor, a man who could help Benjamin utilize his creative play in a more positive (or socially acceptable) direction. Although, interestingly, opinion differed on the extent to which students felt Dyson handled Benjamin's case well (see 10a below). <br />
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6) Dave the counselor's perception of Benjamin is an interesting point of contrast with other authority figures. Everyone else sees Benjamin as <span style="font-style: italic;">the</span> problem, but for Dave he is only <span style="font-style: italic;">a</span> problem, and not the worst one at that (i.e., not as bad as the kid who continually poops his pants, or Mike "Motherfucker.") One paper argued that Dave's "matter of fact" handling of Benjamin shows how Benjamin might have acted differently in a different family. Another paper made the astute observation that it was Dave's letter about the camp reunion, and not Dr. Dyson's treatment, that most seemed to spur Benjamin's efforts to leave the hospital. Still another paper argued for seeing the camp directors as slightly different from the other "authority figures" in the first section. This paper appreciated the wise decision they made to not stigmatize Benjamin by disclosing his diagnosis to counselors and other campers, a decision which seemed to create the circumstances in which Benjamin was able to "thrive" relative to his existence pre-camp.<br />
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7) Several papers pointed out that Dave seems like a surrogate Father/role model for Benjamin. Interestingly, he is exactly the kind of "average guy" mainstream male that Mr. Sherman wishes Benjamin was. And because Benjamin looks up to him, we see Benjamin is not completely outside of even as limited a view of "normal" as his father's.<br />
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8) If being distant, lost in one's own world, and unable to communicate with others are the criteria for being "sick," then isn't Mr. Sherman as sick as Benjamin? Most papers mentioned that nearly all the initial letters encourage the reader to see Benjamin as "sick," but it is only when one views all the letters as a whole that one starts to question the validity of their individual diagnosis. Following through on our class discussions, some students argued that <span style="font-style: italic;">the Sherman family</span> is the major "unsaid" of the text: it is only through a patient (and, of course, partial) reconstruction of the relations between Jeffery and Peggy and their relations to both Benjamin and Hannah that the reader can begin to make sense of Elliot and Benjamin's need for her. <br />
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9) All the authorities see "the problem" as a strictly individual rather than collective one. That is, "the problem" is limited to Benjamin and his behavior, rather than reading Benjamin's behavior as a <span style="font-style: italic;">manifest</span> symptom of a <span style="font-style: italic;">latent</span> context: his family situation. Thus the "cure" is limited to changing Benjamin and not his parents as well (or maybe even society at large?).<br />
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10) Several students drew out comparisons between <i>H </i>and <i>The Turn of the Screw</i> as narratives. In particular, these students were interested in the way both novels seemed to them to lack a complete narrative closure, thus placing the reader in an unusual position. These papers were interested in the effects of narratives which don't adhere to traditional formal expectations: a clear beginning, middle and end, lots of narrative exposition to "explain" things to the reader, and a tight closure where a single and clear authoritative meaning is reached by the end. Instead, these two works seem to share a similar effort to engage the reader in the process of reaching final conclusions, conclusions which could play out in several directions and therefore don't really seem to be "final."<br />
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10a) Some very interesting readings of the end of the novel were produced. Clearly, it is difficult to decide whether or not the ending is some kind of triumph or failure. How do we make sense of the space Benjamin is in by the novel's end? One student argued, "The last page of the novel is the result of Jeffery and Peggy's hard work. Beat down, tired and medicated, Benjamin gives up the most special gift he had, which is his creativeness....it is tragic because Benjamin did not outgrow Elliot but was instead forced to do so." Most students who took this line felt Dyson was complicit in this tragic loss. However, one paper made a plea to understand the position of Dr. Dyson differently: "Eventually, the place that gave him value is gone. His relationship with Elliot ends as well. Both are huge leaps for a special child like Benjamin. Through therapy sessions with Dr. Dyson, and with his new found confidence, it looks as if he found his own sense of self...The last letter from Dr. Dyson was most disturbing to me. After his parent's request to have Benjamin back home...the doctor's response made me feel heartbroken for Benjamin's fate. ...(A)fter I read his last letter my heart dropped at the idea that he will be left back in his parents care, especially without the education and experience of Dr. Dyson. The doctor's letter seemed as if he felt defeated. It was the first time I felt sympathetic to anyone else other than Benjamin."Professor Estevezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16089916647553501445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9113573251204421567.post-79201457730934256372015-11-30T19:21:00.001-05:002015-11-30T19:21:10.331-05:00Return to Oedipus<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOO-tB-3Lgw9IpixB9g91CtYLhl6c_hzDoDGnRa66PnXY5n_p5MTHd1oFfvU-IgIyOYBek6aka8uIpjOnsGOx6RnOW32yAcSKb7WijcIr5Le6_9ACzF3nkHU9YsFbTM1Tom4Pjwe_wpoI/s1600/The+oedipus+familycrop.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5682039031190847970" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOO-tB-3Lgw9IpixB9g91CtYLhl6c_hzDoDGnRa66PnXY5n_p5MTHd1oFfvU-IgIyOYBek6aka8uIpjOnsGOx6RnOW32yAcSKb7WijcIr5Le6_9ACzF3nkHU9YsFbTM1Tom4Pjwe_wpoI/s400/The+oedipus+familycrop.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 291px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></a><br />
Freud’s well known concept was inspired by the Greek legends of Oedipus Rex, especially as they are expressed in Sophocles's play, who unknowingly marries his mother and kills his father. The Oedipus complex is way of talking about both the erotic and destructive components of the child’s (especially the male child’s) relation with its parents. Because the legend is about a figure who usurps the Father's role, both as family and state authority (husband and ruler) and suffers horrific mutilation and guilt as a result, the narrative is useful to Freud as a symbol of childhood rebellion and eventual conformity (or psychological "mutilation" for failure).<br />
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But the legend of Oedipus also has much in common with the ideas in Freud's essay, "The Family Romance." Oedipus is a figure who is on a quest to discover his parentage: he has been raised by surrogates, first a shepherd and later the royal family of Corinth. It is in order to learn the truth of his birth that he embarks on the journey that leads to his tragic enlightenment. It is the universality suggested in the tale, signaled by the solution to the Sphinx's riddle: "mankind," that intrigues Freud, who writes in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Interpretation of Dreams</span>, <br />
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"His destiny moves us only because it might have been ours---because the oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him. It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our Father..." <br />
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I think it's interesting to note the way Freud reads literature here: he looks at it as something which throws light on the other narrative components of our lives---our dreams and our retelling of our pasts. In other words, the overlap between "psychoanalysis" and "literature," illuminates what both domains share: an interest in signification, symbolic representation, narrative, interpretation, <span style="font-style: italic;">issues of reading.</span><br />
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Freud worked and re-worked the idea of Oedipal struggle over the course of his life, using it as a way to think about how individuated consciousness is produced, how "humans" are made. As you recall, Freud theorized the pre-Oedipal infant as boundary-less and unfocused mass of needs and desires, unable to distinguish between objects or understand their relation, as this image of an "infant's eye view" suggests:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgWvf75dGIpXqPaUadZj9t7jVNXz-aZV2EGi9DGGDF8AnjZQ3Jp4kQQBVyxeGkCniF_wDG0YN4535ul9Tn4u5Gc-A5s_ixIXtj9HXpGQ9tBRBolbJ-_-DbOIRQZADHLVKsQIHiysyIDwM/s1600-h/2Picture+showing+how+babies+at+one+month+of+age+can+only+see+vague+blotchesLIFE.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279836132914116482" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgWvf75dGIpXqPaUadZj9t7jVNXz-aZV2EGi9DGGDF8AnjZQ3Jp4kQQBVyxeGkCniF_wDG0YN4535ul9Tn4u5Gc-A5s_ixIXtj9HXpGQ9tBRBolbJ-_-DbOIRQZADHLVKsQIHiysyIDwM/s320/2Picture+showing+how+babies+at+one+month+of+age+can+only+see+vague+blotchesLIFE.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 298px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 320px;" /></a><br />
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Pre-Oedipal consciousness is unable to distinguish between self and other, yet dependent on the care of others to satisfy basic necessities. Freud emphasizes the powerful early role of the child's relation to the mother and the mother's breast (or as illustrated in this slightly de-sexualized photograph from 1947, the bottle) as the site of early sexual pleasure or desire:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOSmFCsfRYqO8_YGSzwBkMUJPoOH7XQAxARiDSZlUTd3uf4ter4VA4-kVnJ0p6CKxD0CM0cWCOYog09cB3fTwH-tyDNybslLE0Up_Q9BLdW56zZ1xvUFNR0InKmRZNYrF1XSwUGGFaexs/s1600-h/2Picture+showing+how+babies+at+six+months+of+age+can+probably+see+only+one+thing+clearly+at+a+time.LIFE.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279839403084306066" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOSmFCsfRYqO8_YGSzwBkMUJPoOH7XQAxARiDSZlUTd3uf4ter4VA4-kVnJ0p6CKxD0CM0cWCOYog09cB3fTwH-tyDNybslLE0Up_Q9BLdW56zZ1xvUFNR0InKmRZNYrF1XSwUGGFaexs/s320/2Picture+showing+how+babies+at+six+months+of+age+can+probably+see+only+one+thing+clearly+at+a+time.LIFE.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 290px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 320px;" /></a><br />
<br />
The pre-Oedipal child's world is focused on the Mother (or a fusion between Self and Mother):<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbHjXwh6tyJefT3EYCr-3utaM_6PrtsJ1djeziv04OYHF2V1w7PhGBEAg8Ppzadto8ZoUxAPTZzgFbVlp5Gydm56-W4XHNPw2m3PAua_pIl2qGyiQIOhE6FdK6wCSRYXrf3Popd7_aypo/s1600-h/2Picture+showing+how+three-dimensional+world+begins+to+form+around+baby+at+about+nine+months+of+ageLIFE.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279819475042438530" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbHjXwh6tyJefT3EYCr-3utaM_6PrtsJ1djeziv04OYHF2V1w7PhGBEAg8Ppzadto8ZoUxAPTZzgFbVlp5Gydm56-W4XHNPw2m3PAua_pIl2qGyiQIOhE6FdK6wCSRYXrf3Popd7_aypo/s320/2Picture+showing+how+three-dimensional+world+begins+to+form+around+baby+at+about+nine+months+of+ageLIFE.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 286px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 320px;" /></a><br />
<br />
into which the Father intervenes, an unwelcome rival and threatening challenger<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiF0dOyHLEUTCvKBMRbpt2LUatQX0GWx4a3JQNGi8ubZu0E_oQO9XhxoIaY7E4y3IWlbuj8L1jolekBBt5_46qSRshFX1Jl3UeTCqkBAbQxOQ5v7IPu-V-njoZM6IWHC-CaY93lk28qFnA/s1600-h/2Picture+showing+how+everything+looks+big+to+18+month+old+child+LIFE.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279819353622521122" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiF0dOyHLEUTCvKBMRbpt2LUatQX0GWx4a3JQNGi8ubZu0E_oQO9XhxoIaY7E4y3IWlbuj8L1jolekBBt5_46qSRshFX1Jl3UeTCqkBAbQxOQ5v7IPu-V-njoZM6IWHC-CaY93lk28qFnA/s320/2Picture+showing+how+everything+looks+big+to+18+month+old+child+LIFE.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 229px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 320px;" /></a><br />
<br />
to whose power the infant must eventually capitulate.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9piBQjLMAUUPM5ndDn7XysXrcl0WyRWaWnJ2MNtbYSV88_YTD_jY7PZ81S6M_SYRBcOgUl0KeTHBzOPBfkBuPZ9e5EhptHkS9WnOWxUNY2Q54hsdruLfdIG3AyW4AgvgX12TuZr158p8/s1600-h/father.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279845068387464818" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9piBQjLMAUUPM5ndDn7XysXrcl0WyRWaWnJ2MNtbYSV88_YTD_jY7PZ81S6M_SYRBcOgUl0KeTHBzOPBfkBuPZ9e5EhptHkS9WnOWxUNY2Q54hsdruLfdIG3AyW4AgvgX12TuZr158p8/s320/father.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 320px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 311px;" /></a><br />
<br />
The child must concede power and centrality to adult authority, moreover his/her early polymorphous sexuality must be funneled into socially acceptable channels: no more self or incestuous pleasure and proper identification with properly gendered role models. The boy learns to accept and identify with male authority, the girl learns to identify with the mother and accede to this less powerful position (though perhaps always resentfully). Through negotiating the traumatic upheavals of the Oedipal struggle, a boundary-less nexus of libidinal pleasures learns to accept His or Her place in the vastly hierarchical scheme of things: gender roles reinforced, satisfactions postponed, authority accepted, the family and society reproduced.<br />
<br />
I've sketched out a very simplified account of the Freudian Oedipal struggle because I want to highlight its narrative elements, its function as a story about the birth of individual consciousness through struggle and conflict with parental (and by extension, social) authority and power. <span style="font-style: italic;">But if the Oedipus narrative is a story about capitulation, the Family Romance is a tale of the child getting his own back, fighting for independence by rewriting the family narrative.</span>Professor Estevezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16089916647553501445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9113573251204421567.post-18692864600393482812015-11-30T19:19:00.003-05:002015-11-30T19:19:24.264-05:00The Family Romance<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpy_Z0-25IsTowLjuf8GyINbJluCggxl87y7Oa9wCQ2FuHJz1jHSZFME0FZFdSXpC8XNI7zgQGV9L3PqKydEYdLBsiI7s_zodAIxfaP0zAqxcV-3MJZVu229SS1s7Pa1bEj0OJm1-suds/s1600-h/charles+ray+family+romance.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5275013101856802674" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpy_Z0-25IsTowLjuf8GyINbJluCggxl87y7Oa9wCQ2FuHJz1jHSZFME0FZFdSXpC8XNI7zgQGV9L3PqKydEYdLBsiI7s_zodAIxfaP0zAqxcV-3MJZVu229SS1s7Pa1bEj0OJm1-suds/s320/charles+ray+family+romance.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 237px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 320px;" /></a>In his short essay, "The Family Romance," Freud talks about the common childhood fantasy of imagining oneself adopted, the child of some other, much better and cooler set of parents. He uses the phrase to talk about the conflicts between parents and children as the child necessarily grows up and grows away from his family.<br />
<br />
Freud theorized that a denigration of one's parents replaces an early overestimation of them and that such feelings and desires are not only part of a “healthy” transition to adulthood, but are less about actually “hating” one's parents than kind of contradictory “expression of the child’s longing for the happy, vanished days when his father seemed to him the noblest and strongest of men and mother the dearest and loveliest of women. He is turning away from the father whom he knows to-day to the father in whom he believed in the earlier years of his childhood; and his phantasy is no more than the expression of a regret that those happy days have gone...”<br />
<br />
The "family romance" fantasy also addresses the child’s question, “who am I?” and so expresses an attempt to place oneself in a broader social history. Thus, it can also touch on issues of social relations and relations between extra-familial generations as well issues of aging and the passage of time.<br />
<br />
My question for our discussion of <i>Fun Home </i>is: Is some element of the family romance fantasy necessary to autobiography, or even memory itself?<br />
<br />
(The image above is Charles Ray's "The Family Romance," a sculpture in which all of the members of a generic family have been resized to equal height. Because the figures are not quite either "adult" or "child" sized---they are roughly 4 1/2 feet tall---it's not easy to resolve if it's the parents who have been brought down to size or the children who've been enlarged. Nevertheless, whenever I see it, I see miniaturized parents before I see a gigantic baby.)Professor Estevezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16089916647553501445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9113573251204421567.post-4778693273352226082015-11-30T19:18:00.000-05:002015-11-30T19:18:11.512-05:00Alison Bechdel on Fun HomeIn this interview, Bechdel describes her writing/drawing process in creating <span style="font-style: italic;">Fun Home</span>, including her methods of research. You'll see a couple of family photos as well as the actual site she incorporated into a particular scene:<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/cumLU3UpcGY" width="420"></iframe><br />
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And here you can see Bechdel reading from her memoir:<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/63sCzF9Tu6E" width="420"></iframe>Professor Estevezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16089916647553501445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9113573251204421567.post-72011011886363625872015-11-25T09:23:00.002-05:002015-11-25T09:23:14.307-05:00This old house<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_Onp4lQiizyLSWK8tNA0gIoAHFN8nx6dLuT5T4zz4lg3k0JC24IbJcHjo4sJDNAFhwabEijy6xNgl_wOV8SCTUlO6qRtxgH_ebI7sjcBaFnCbukNIG9nkCr5KY31YijvUe6BwGFYaVYo/s1600-h/bechnel.1.650.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273041813650311186" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_Onp4lQiizyLSWK8tNA0gIoAHFN8nx6dLuT5T4zz4lg3k0JC24IbJcHjo4sJDNAFhwabEijy6xNgl_wOV8SCTUlO6qRtxgH_ebI7sjcBaFnCbukNIG9nkCr5KY31YijvUe6BwGFYaVYo/s320/bechnel.1.650.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 214px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 320px;" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjIQou1gzAdblSf4g68AbWc8nAmoP19-yGtNXA5lGrzJWGLE123CGr7JJSwhoL_d-MQG13tiU6bswSt7U0pDI5X24xqTI2GqQiw-0lqmQFoXxTdzrBSVuoOt8qEuar41RGsBJ72Mr4xv0/s1600-h/bechnel.4.600.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273041737404182706" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjIQou1gzAdblSf4g68AbWc8nAmoP19-yGtNXA5lGrzJWGLE123CGr7JJSwhoL_d-MQG13tiU6bswSt7U0pDI5X24xqTI2GqQiw-0lqmQFoXxTdzrBSVuoOt8qEuar41RGsBJ72Mr4xv0/s320/bechnel.4.600.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 152px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 320px;" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjJwEiwZb8BkYZDyDLCaNWA7pRXXhOIjRXaeqTCo8PnIndB8M1WQZXWTL5itXzvmVuiHH3eDPADrbn7VDcpBhNPcYsSPyTLqtL2g5RNif5ezCa_ePNzZgzknRXsc6D3-IY1LLD3NM4eVQ/s1600-h/bechnel.6.650.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273041665818952050" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjJwEiwZb8BkYZDyDLCaNWA7pRXXhOIjRXaeqTCo8PnIndB8M1WQZXWTL5itXzvmVuiHH3eDPADrbn7VDcpBhNPcYsSPyTLqtL2g5RNif5ezCa_ePNzZgzknRXsc6D3-IY1LLD3NM4eVQ/s320/bechnel.6.650.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 225px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 320px;" /></a>One place to start thinking about how Bechdel's narrative is developed visually as well as textually, is to focus on how the interior "shots" are composed. What sense of everyday life is conveyed? How are relations between family members structured by their situation within rooms, hallways, windows, and so forth?<br />
<br />
The first two photos above are from a fascinating New York Times interview with Alison Bechdel that takes place during a visit to her former home (now owned by others, but still keeping much of the original decoration intact). The writer, Ginia Bellefonte makes this perceptive remark about how the Victorian restoration is visual map of Bruce Bechdel's psyche:<br />
<br />
"The offending accouterments are still in place: wallpaper imprinted with floral buds and a heavy chandelier that looks as if it were made of skulls. The combination seems a reminder of just how powerfully Victorian décor embraced the nascent and the sepulchral, life and the negation of it, much as the era’s mores were charged with the tension between vagrant urges and the enforced repression of them. If Bruce Bechdel aimed to keep the truth of his life hidden, one could argue that he also put it flamboyantly on display."<br />
<br />
The rest of the article can be found <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/03/garden/03bechdel.html?_r=4&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&ref=garden&adxnnlx=1154913282-+1SNH8sRkuz5azY4XDISuQ">here.</a> The last photo above is a snapshot from when the Bechdel family was in residence. I'm sure you can pick out everything in the photo including the vase that somehow got too close to the edge of the table...<br />
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You can find a related NYT Q & A session with Alison Bechdel <a href="http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/07/20/stray-questions-for-alison-bechdel/#more-78">here.</a>Professor Estevezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16089916647553501445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9113573251204421567.post-54301311203674424192015-11-22T12:56:00.001-05:002015-11-22T12:56:23.330-05:00Screen/ing Memories<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuaXvT1jkz60_42HT2ubdS0Hog-pBiVxB8PoWPtpCdz-k3Mrk-Oy2F1O_XpZP_w3dywXekQRDWOvuOyDL5ZIvmtLEjVhkgcbWGBjPRd0mTwaDszHQheM1URJGhItzt44SPsmuZoyXHR_0/s1600/gordon+darkness+and+light.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5673851066894172418" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuaXvT1jkz60_42HT2ubdS0Hog-pBiVxB8PoWPtpCdz-k3Mrk-Oy2F1O_XpZP_w3dywXekQRDWOvuOyDL5ZIvmtLEjVhkgcbWGBjPRd0mTwaDszHQheM1URJGhItzt44SPsmuZoyXHR_0/s400/gordon+darkness+and+light.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 300px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></a><br />
The last literary text we are examining this semester is Alison Bechdel's <i>Fun Home</i>, an ambitious memoir about her childhood and her relation to her father (and other family members). The last two bits of Freud we will read are two essays which may be helpful in approaching Bechdel: "Screen Memories," and "The Family Romance." The following is an introduction to Freud's thoughts on the memory, and especially childhood memory/memories of childhood.<br />
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The problem of memory is at the heart of Freud’s work. Before he developed his theories of dreams and their relation to the Unconscious, he argued for the central position of memory as a subject of analysis. We can see the importance memory would have in his later work in his early attempt to define the root of "hysteria:" "Hysterics suffer from reminiscences." In his essay, "Screen Memories," Freud saw a psychological function of general importance, that memory is an active process of the present, reorganizing and reinterpreting the past at the same time preserving shards of original experience. It is through memory that we produce the narrative that is our "selves," a fictional construct with its own truths.<br />
<br />
One of the most provocative suggestions in Freud's early and brief
essay, "Screen Memories," is the notion that memory itself is <i>a kind of
fictional narrative.</i> In other words, memory is more about the present than it is about the past and it is always "image-inary" in nature: something we create rather than just "have." At the end of "Screen Memories," Freud remarks, "It is perhaps altogether questionable whether we have any conscious memories <span style="font-style: italic;">from</span> childhood: perhaps we have only memories <span style="font-style: italic;">of</span> childhood. These show us the first years of our lives not as they were, but as they appeared to us at later periods..."<br />
<br />
In her book on children's fiction, <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=ao1045IYK8sC&printsec=frontcover&dq=the+case+of+peter+pan&ei=M2k0SfvFOKfKzATjx-zqBQ"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Case of Peter Pan, or The Impossibility of Children's Fiction</span></a>, literary theorist Jacqueline Rose offers some comments on Freud's essay that may be of interest to our work on representation of memory and childhood.<br />
<br />
Rose
is interested in the way that Freud seems to come to his master concept
of the Unconcious via his early essay on childhood memory. We've read
much of our Freud out of chronological order, so it is useful to
remember that "Screen Memories" predates Freud's work on dreams and the
consequent elaboration of his theories of repression, displacement and
sublimation: the transformation of meaning that takes place in the
dream-work.<br />
<br />
"We do not realise that Freud was first
brought up against the unconscious when asking how we remember ourselves
as a child. The unconscious is not an object, something to be laid hold
of and retrieved. It is the term which Freud used to descibe the
complex way in which our very idea of ourselves as children is
produced... Setting himself to analyse one of his earliest
recollections, he found that the event he remembered had never taken
pace. The importance of the memory was not, however, any the less for
that. For what it revealed was the unresolved conflicts affecting the
way in which he was thinking about himself <span style="font-style: italic;">now</span>.
[One of] the most crucial aspects of psychoanalysis is the insistence
that childhood is something in which we continue to be implicated and
which is never simply left behind. Childhood persists... It persists as
something which we endlessly rework in our attempt to build an image of
our own history. When we think about childhood, it is above all our
investment in doing so that counts...<br />
<br />
For Freud,
neither childhood nor meaning can be pinned down---they shift, and our
own identity with them... [T]he often contradictory and inconsistent
ways that childhood appears in analysis undermines any notion of a
straightforward sequence and throws into crisis our relationship to
meaning itself. Meaning is not simply there---it is built up, it can be
determined by totally contradictory associations, and can emerge long
after the event which apparently gives it form." (12-16)Professor Estevezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16089916647553501445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9113573251204421567.post-66546472213419257392015-11-21T13:46:00.000-05:002015-11-21T13:46:11.110-05:00Introducing Fun Home<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6UFYHKBuHxERO8JW5DOv25hA4mPjR_3pSU-ChD-6uVTzaMk8A7Er4TC3S0_IOZqtLk_1bdGo1LUpv1DdiwUYtfSQTZcxFTF03StZfuVwf1AD8nh_7QCpTQm65vu6mUkCwgzmDLXFpVTA/s1600-h/bechdel.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277149265035820018" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6UFYHKBuHxERO8JW5DOv25hA4mPjR_3pSU-ChD-6uVTzaMk8A7Er4TC3S0_IOZqtLk_1bdGo1LUpv1DdiwUYtfSQTZcxFTF03StZfuVwf1AD8nh_7QCpTQm65vu6mUkCwgzmDLXFpVTA/s320/bechdel.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 213px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 320px;" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVI9GtF29eZ2Cna_vQGkfFx9zJbC-5_o-GYLBSX_nxzF0hazp1GLITNfXtNQZFogRmHXci5sdZ1OZTODZCNw4HrfN6RZ6xixyQR0-EnTJ9BzxD5rvsrLEwajaG0x25W670nTXGpbQ6Qc0/s1600-h/Fun_Home_photoreference.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277144216548250018" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVI9GtF29eZ2Cna_vQGkfFx9zJbC-5_o-GYLBSX_nxzF0hazp1GLITNfXtNQZFogRmHXci5sdZ1OZTODZCNw4HrfN6RZ6xixyQR0-EnTJ9BzxD5rvsrLEwajaG0x25W670nTXGpbQ6Qc0/s320/Fun_Home_photoreference.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 191px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 320px;" /></a>In 2006 <a href="http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1570801,00.html">Time Magazine</a> picked <span style="font-style: italic;">Fun Home</span> as the best book of the year. Not as the best comic book or graphic novel, or fiction or memoir, <span style="font-weight: bold;">but best BOOK period.</span> Here's a multimedia roundup of <span style="font-style: italic;">Fun Home</span> information you may find of interest.<br />
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First, some stuff to read:<br />
<br />
The Wikipedia entry on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alison_Bechdel">Alison Bechdel</a> is pretty good. Here you will learn useful things and fun trivia such as Bechdel is a member of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary and her baby brother <a href="http://www.lollipop.com/article.php3?content=issue66/f-falseicons.html">John</a> is now a keyboardist who's played with Ministry, Fear Factory, Prong and Killing Joke among other bands.<br />
<br />
Alison Bechdel's <a href="http://www.dykestowatchoutfor.com/index.php">website</a> is a compendium of useful items: an archive of her comic strip, information about other past and future projects, links to reviews about <span style="font-style: italic;">Fun Home</span> and so on. One thing you might want to take a look at <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/memoir_week/2007/03/what_the_little_old_ladies_feel.html">is a piece she wrote for Slate about telling her mother she was writing about their family.</a> <br />
<br />
Here's a short YouTube video of Bechdel drawing the wallpaper endpapers of <span style="font-style: italic;">Fun Home</span>:<br />
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And here she talks about her process of drawing many of the scenes in the book by acting out and photographing herself in many of the character's roles (adding more to the many uses of photography in <span style="font-style: italic;">Fun Home</span>):<br />
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Here's an early (1981) strip which now reads as trial run for part of Fun Home. <a href="http://www.oberlinlgbt.org/bechdel/bechdel-1.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">Coming Out Story</span></a> covers some of the same incidents that are also represented in <span style="font-style: italic;">Fun Home.</span><br />
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And if you want to see how academics have treated <span style="font-style: italic;">Fun Home</span>, here are links to three downloadable .pdf's of papers presented at a scholarly conference in France:<span style="text-decoration: underline;"><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span></span><a href="http://www.graat.fr/bechdel001aaaa.pdf" target="_blank" title="Double Trajectories"><i>Double Trajectories: Crossing Lines in </i>Fun Home</a>, by Karim Chabani, <a href="http://www.graat.fr/bechdel002aaaa.pdf" target="_blank" title="Image as Paratext"><i>Images as Paratext in Alison Bechdel’s </i>Fun Home</a>, by Agnes Muller and <a href="http://www.graat.fr/bechdel003aaaa.pdf" target="_blank" title="Drag as a Metaphor"><i>Drag as Metaphor and the Quest for Meaning in Alison Bechdel’s</i> Fun Home, a Family Tragicomic</a>, by Helene Tison.<br />
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In 2009, <i>Fun Home</i> was adapted as a musical by Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori. It debuted Off-Broadway in 2013 and was a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, winning the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Musical and the Obie Award for Musical Theater the same year. A Broadway production began in 2015, which won five Tony Awards. Professor Estevezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16089916647553501445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9113573251204421567.post-75288152651715936042015-11-17T16:13:00.000-05:002015-12-11T19:15:04.297-05:00Thoughts on first papers<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSjoKmqvKI4mCi3uHWSBfVF9nbXw5bf7w3PGexv8Dv3OLxFy99kvbr5YYvkUSqYKnQw9p7MCtjJMx0HJQFBXUU1NIJTAS8T4uiuNZ3jJQ_MjZYpbuPAA28DAyVl9waJ2bf2kRk4NEnqLc/s1600/comic.JPG" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5673004459170717858" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSjoKmqvKI4mCi3uHWSBfVF9nbXw5bf7w3PGexv8Dv3OLxFy99kvbr5YYvkUSqYKnQw9p7MCtjJMx0HJQFBXUU1NIJTAS8T4uiuNZ3jJQ_MjZYpbuPAA28DAyVl9waJ2bf2kRk4NEnqLc/s400/comic.JPG" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 400px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 283px;" /></a><br />
Although I'm going to try to hand the papers back this Wednesday, I hope I can put everyone's mind at rest by saying that this batch of papers was quite good: most everyone exhibited clear engagement with the ideas we've been working over in class. I wanted this first assignment to give you a kind of experimental space to "play" with the theory we've been discussing, to bring it into the space of reading fiction and perhaps discover new ways to think about narrative and its place in our lives.<br />
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I know some students felt flustered by the lack of conventional essay guidelines. Clearly, I didn't want students to simply reproduce the ideas they'd read or the discussion we've had. That can be a tall order when much of your education has focused precisely on those skills: mastery of a formula and its accurate reproduction <i>are</i> useful processes for some areas of academic study, if not all. And that kind of "learning" is pretty much where we all begin our earliest lessons: mimicking the sounds cooed to us by parents, following their instructions help us become a "big boy" or a "big girl."<br />
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But, necessary as this kind of mastery of social convention is for the infant, it is a far cry from learning to be able to critically reflect on those conventions, on our lives and on our adult selves. Learning how to consciously <span style="font-style: italic;">use</span> ideas is the empowering conceptual break common to both pedagogy and psychoanalysis. <br />
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Freud once wrote that "The discovery of the unconscious and the introduction of it into consciousness is performed in the face of a continuous resistance on the part of the patient. The process of bringing this unconscious material to light is associated with pain, and because of this pain the patient again and again rejects it...[however] if you succeed in persuading him to accept, by virtue of a better understanding, something that up to now, in consequence of this automatic regulation by pain, he has rejected, you will then have accomplished something towards his education."<br />
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Though all of your papers had varying strengths, it was clear to me that there was still resistance (and most of it probably unconscious) to push beyond the usual English paper assignment. Many papers began by rehearsing information about Freud or about psychoanalysis or about Henry James that was completely unnecessary for this paper. I think we can take it as a given that Freud and Henry James are "famous writers" and other such generalities. Papers which began this way usually didn't stray too far from simple "book reports" (rehearsal of plot) or comparison/contrast essays.<br />
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Likewise, many students exhibited a great deal of anxiety about the assignment both before and after. I'm not so much interested in all of this in terms of "correcting problems;" I am interested, though, in the roots of such fear and how it can obstruct learning. The last time I taught this course, a student once linked "the Uncanny" with students' performance anxiety: grounding it both in <i>the fear of not seeing</i> (not understanding things correctly) and <i>the fear of being seen</i> (looking like an idiot in front of the teacher/class). I think that the repression trauma that produces the infant as functioning subject certainly has a clear analogy in our current educational structures. <br />
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But, back to the papers. Here are a few interesting and useful bits from the papers on "The Turn of the Screw:" I think there are some good ideas here for further work in future papers. I particularly want to turn your attention to the way these students touched on the role of the reader: that the novel was not just a story <i>about</i> the Uncanny, but an <i>experience </i>of it.<br />
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Andrew began his paper with a frank admission of his anxiety over the assignment: not being sure he understood the concepts under discussion, not being sure he understood the novel, not being sure how to draw both together, and so on. But, he also related how this frustration with "not knowing" let him to rethink "knowing" itself: "In class we discussed the calculated ambiguity of the novel, so I realized my duty to inject my own perceptions into the stories' blurred parameters....I no longer looked for answers, but created them with Freud as my guide." Andrew expressed how this freed him up to explore areas of the narrative he previously hadn't considered; finally deciding to read "The Turn of the Screw" as a kind of allegory about control (though the use of the term "allegory" is mine not Andrew's). The rest of his paper explored the Governess being "haunted" by her lack of control within the framework of being put in sole control. I think some of Andrew's ideas can be profitably extended to both <i>H </i>and <i>Fun Home, </i>both of which foreground the relations between children and parents.<br />
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Bar, too, focused on the relation between knowledge and "the Uncanny." His starting point was that of Freud's definition: the Uncanny doesn't disturb through novelty, but by familiarity, albeit the unfamiliar aspects of what is assumed to be "well known." But Bar pushes this even further: "The uncanny does not create disquiet simply because it introduces a new, unknown aspect to something which was perceived to be known. It is that which exposes everything to be necessarily unintelligible. The uncanny does not lie solely in the story, but rather is an effect of the reading itself. The experience of reading the story in itself reveals to the reader that they in fact don't have anyway of knowing anything." The rest of his paper follows up the "funhouse" effect of the multitude of doubling and doubles found throughout "The Turn of the Screw." Everything that seems "objective" is "subjective," everything the seems clear is revealed to be opaque, everything seems to fold into its opposite: The Good Governess and The Bad Jessel are obvious mirror images. Bar talks about an "Inception"-like chain reaction produced by the Uncanny: an unending opening up of ambiguity where once there was certainty, a chain of possible readings and interpretations which constantly undermine each other. Bar seems to take the Uncanny to an almost nihilistic point---can we really know anything?<br />
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Tehreem focused most of her discussion on the Governess and her uncanny experience of the ghosts. She points out that this uncanny quality is an effect not of their "supernatural" status (spirits of the dead!) but instead of their narrative function as doubles. These "ghosts" have returned because they are the repressed: they represent not only the individual repressed desires of the Governess (sexual in nature), but also the larger repressed behaviors of society itself (based in class divisions).<br />
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Quelsy started with a discussion of "The Sandman" and extended that story's recurring motif of eyes/sight into an examination of the dynamic of the seen/unseen in "The Turn of the Screw." He compared the ghosts' desire to be seen to that of the Governess. Both crave a recognition; in the case of the Governess, she want to be "seen" by the Master as fulfilling his desires, but his desires can only be fulfilled be her remaining "unseen" (not contacting him). He also points out how the frustrations of the characters in the text mirror the frustrations of the reader with the text---what is it that the reader "sees?"<br />
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Caroline began by thinking about the convention of the "ghost story:" a narrative which usually entertains by scaring us in sometimes unpredictable, sometimes predictable, but always "safe" ways. She finds "The Turn of the Screw" parting ways with the traditional ghost story because its distressing effects are not found in the "unusual" elements of the story (the ghosts, which aren't particularly scary in a conventional way) but in the disquiet of the "everyday:" things taken for granted that are revealed to be less familiar, less understood, than initially supposed. And worse, the possible impossibility of ever being able to know with <i>certainty:</i> the children, innocent or corrupt? the Governess, careful or neglectful of the children? Caroline ended her paper with how this ambiguity rebounds on the reader: "scaring" us with this lack of certainty rather than showing us some "certain" evil.<br />
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These are only a few examples of the work everyone did in their papers. But they give a glance at the differing ways people approached the assignment and differing aspects of both the novel and the concept of the Uncanny that students focused on. One carry over from this assignment to the next paper might be to again think about the position of the reader: how a text might "force" us to read it in a certain fashion, and what the results of that are on the reader. And also, what Freud's texts teach us about reading: how do we "interpret" the stories we encounter---not just in this class but also in our lives in general. As I think most students concluded at some point in their papers, a final certainty seems to be off the table. But what about reading less as a way to find answers and more as a way to construct (new, useful) questions?Professor Estevezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16089916647553501445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9113573251204421567.post-17108020056816263702015-11-16T12:43:00.000-05:002015-11-16T12:43:38.764-05:00Excavating H<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFHxwP3LBO4XFcMsloEKKaGbgWreLUqJ5C2fnM5Wj-F-RC3mpesUp2Tg8Ee2JTyRL-jRMyAR6JfrrlRh011p1LGR1-PFv6Pr9SOlEUaerxAV812xniixRv834zR_A0AdvDtvlQJWBrIUA/s1600-h/js.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5269814076701834498" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFHxwP3LBO4XFcMsloEKKaGbgWreLUqJ5C2fnM5Wj-F-RC3mpesUp2Tg8Ee2JTyRL-jRMyAR6JfrrlRh011p1LGR1-PFv6Pr9SOlEUaerxAV812xniixRv834zR_A0AdvDtvlQJWBrIUA/s320/js.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 320px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 320px;" /></a>
Elizabeth Shepard's novel, <span style="font-style: italic;">H</span>, is a story told entirely through letters---correspondence by, or concerning, the case of Benjamin Sherman. The plot is necessarily fragmented: we have no comprehensive narrative exposition which ties the events of the plot together into an interpretive whole. The role of the reader, then, is much like the Freudian analyst who examines each dream, memory or association as a rich piece of evidence or telling relic, a part which suggests the missing or repressed whole. Freud often likened his work to that of an archeologist, one who examines surface detritus for what it suggests about structures buried beneath.<br />
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Freud used the metaphor of archeology quite early in his work, long before he fully developed the model of accessing latent content via its manifest traces in dream interpretation. In <span style="font-style: italic;">Studies of Hysteria</span>, he likened analysis to "the technique of excavating a buried city." And in his essay "Delusions and Dream in Jensen's <span style="font-style: italic;">Gradiva</span>," he again invoked the metaphor in this passage: "There is actually no better analogy for repression, which both makes something in the mind inaccessible and preserves it, than the burial that was the fate of Pompeii and from which the city could reappear through the work of the spade."<br />
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Literary theorist Pierre Macherey called such interpretive work, <span style="font-style: italic;">symptomatic reading</span>. As in psychoanalysis what is not said is as important as what is said, and a symptomatic reading must focus on what the narrative omits or excludes as well as what it has included. Clearly, <span style="font-style: italic;">H</span> demands an attentive reader who can read the silences in and between individual letters, who can hear what is stubbornly not being said, who can perceive the avoided and repressed as well as the obvious. For most of the characters in <span style="font-style: italic;">H</span>, Benjamin is clearly <span style="font-style: italic;">the</span> problem, for the reader he is part of <span style="font-style: italic;">a problematic</span>: a larger story which includes the story of the Sherman family, the story of Mr. and Mrs. Sherman, the story of siblings Benjamin and Hannah, the story of conventional psychiatric treatment, the story of conventional notions of childhood and childhood development, and so forth, all of which must be excavated in order to make sense of Benjamin <span style="font-style: italic;">and</span> Elliot.<br />
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Discuss your excavation of <span style="font-style: italic;">H</span>: what were you able to reconstruct of the "missing" problematic? What parts remain indeterminate or unrecoverable? Does the narrative itself suggest or imply certain ways of filling in the blanks? Does it favor some interpretations over others? And most importantly, how does the narrative conceptualize the important categories of "sick" and "healthy"? The text's authority figures all take Benjamin to be "sick" (though with differing definitions of "illness") and they advocate for his "health" (again with very differing notions of "sanity"). How does the narrative resolve these contradictions (or does it)? Clearly Benjamin has changed by the end of the story, and clearly this change is predicated on the loss of a rich and creative, if quirky, imaginative structure. Much like the Freudian infant whose polymorphous capacity for pleasure must be narrowed down and contained within accepted behaviors, Benjamin must shed those parts of his psyche which "don't fit." Does the narrative suggest how we should interpret and judge his transformation?<br />
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Length: around 5 pages<br />
Due: Monday, November 30Professor Estevezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16089916647553501445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9113573251204421567.post-23420689788713120222015-11-10T12:19:00.002-05:002015-11-10T12:19:39.301-05:00The "Fort / Da" Game<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzp1Oq-tB085kyihmT30XKbYWrIwdINsTyA1j6TAOFOKxM_veQMsZdbu3-7n_1zZPXJVE2QKIm-ytELmVMaamAdklmnR_yNwq3819GU0aam_TM6QD_YRGsIAmwezkqbWwNdhsla-IGrDk/s1600-h/1920_01.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzp1Oq-tB085kyihmT30XKbYWrIwdINsTyA1j6TAOFOKxM_veQMsZdbu3-7n_1zZPXJVE2QKIm-ytELmVMaamAdklmnR_yNwq3819GU0aam_TM6QD_YRGsIAmwezkqbWwNdhsla-IGrDk/s320/1920_01.jpg" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5264829945266580626" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 240px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 176px;" /></a>(Above, Freud and his daughter Sophie, whose son Ernst is the<span style="font-style: italic;"> fort / da spieler</span>.)<br />
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In <span style="font-style: italic;">Beyond the Pleasure Principle</span> (1920), Sigmund Freud relates the story of a game his grandson invented at the age of one and a half, before he could speak many words. He used to throw small objects away from him, then say "o-o-o-o" with pleasure. He also took a wooden spool attached to a piece of string, and threw it over the edge of his cot, so that it disappeared. After saying "o-o-o-o," he would pull it back to himself and say, "da." He repeated this game over and over. Freud and the boy’s mother understood him to be saying "<span style="font-style: italic;">fort</span>" and "<span style="font-style: italic;">da</span>" (German for "gone" and "there").<br />
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Freud theorized that this game of disappearance and return allowed the boy to manage his anxiety about the absences of his mother, to whom he was very attached. By controlling the actual presence and absence of an object, he was able to manage the virtual presence of his mother. The fort / da game was the child’s invention of symbolism: the use of one object (wooden reel) to represent another (mother).<br />
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If you recall our earlier discussion of language, you'll remember that Jacques Lacan discusses the important moment in the development of subjectivity when the child grasps the idea of language (the field of culturally symbolic sounds and representations) and so enters what he terms, "the symbolic order." In Lacan's reworking of Freud, language---symbolic representation---is the all important medium through which our access to "the real" is structured.<br />
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Freud's grandson was using his creative play as a way to deal with a basic childhood anxiety through representation. He was asserting control over his environment, learning a method to dispel anxiety and frustration and coming to terms with a concept: absence and presence, the idea that mother can be "gone" yet still there, in memory and play.<br />
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Here is the relevant section from <span style="font-style: italic;">Beyond the Pleasure Principle</span>:<br />
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"…At this point I propose to leave the dark and dismal subject of the traumatic neurosis and pass on to examine the method of working employed by the mental apparatus in one of its earliest normal activities. I mean in children's play.<br />
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The different theories of children's play have only recently been summarized and discussed from the psychoanalytic point of view by Pfeifer (1919), to whose paper I would refer my readers. These theories attempt to discover the motives which lead children to play, but they fail to bring into the foreground the economic motive, the consideration of the yield of pleasure involved. Without wishing to include the whole field covered by these phenomena, I have been able, through a chance opportunity which presented itself, to throw some light upon the first game played by a little boy of one and a half and invented by himself. It was more than a mere fleeting observation, for I lived under the same roof as the child and his parents for some weeks, and it was some time before I discovered the meaning of the puzzling activity which he constantly repeated.<br />
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The child was not at all precocious in his intellectual development. At the age of one and a half he could say only a few comprehensible words; he could also make use of a number of sounds which expressed a meaning intelligible to those around him. He was, however, on good terms with his parents and their one servant-girl, and tributes were paid to his being a 'good boy'. He did not disturb his parents at night, he conscientiously obeyed orders not to touch certain things or go into certain rooms, and above all he never cried when his mother left him for a few hours. At the same time, he was greatly attached to his mother, who had not only fed him herself but had also looked after him without any outside help. This good little boy, however, had an occasional disturbing habit of taking any small objects he could get hold of and throwing them away from him into a corner, under the bed, and so on, so that hunting for his toys and picking them up was often quite a business. As he did this he gave vent to a loud, long-drawn-out '<span style="font-style: italic;">o-o-o-o</span>', accompanied by an expression of interest and satisfaction. His mother and the writer of the present account were agreed in thinking that this was not a mere interjection but represented the German word '<span style="font-style: italic;">fort</span>' ['gone']. I eventually realized that it was a game and that the only use he made of any of his toys was to play 'gone' with them. One day I made an observation which confirmed my view. The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string tied round it. It never occurred to him to pull it along the floor behind him, for instance, and play at its being a carriage. What he did was to hold the reel by the string and very skillfully throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his expressive '<span style="font-style: italic;">o-o-o-o</span>'. He then pulled the reel out of the cot again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful '<span style="font-style: italic;">da</span>' ['there']. This, then, was the complete game of disappearance and return. As a rule one only witnessed its first act, which was repeated untiringly as a game in itself, though there is no doubt that the greater pleasure was attached to the second act. (1)<br />
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The interpretation of the game then became obvious. It was related to the child's great cultural achievement: the instinctual renunciation (that is, the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction) which he had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting He compensated himself for this, as it were, by himself staging the disappearance and return of the objects within his reach. It is of course a matter of indifference from the point of view of judging the effective nature of the game whether the child invented it himself or took it over on some outside suggestion. Our interest is directed to another point. The child cannot possibly have felt his mother's departure as something agreeable or even indifferent. How then does his repetition of this distressing experience as a game fit in with the pleasure principle? It may perhaps be said in reply that her departure had to be enacted as a necessary preliminary to her joyful return, and that it was in the latter that lay the true purpose of the game. But against this must be counted the observed fact that the first act, that of departure, was staged as a game in itself and far more frequently than the episode in its entirety, with its pleasurable ending.<br />
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No certain decision can be reached from the analysis of a single case like this. On an unprejudiced view one gets an impression that the child turned his experience into a game from another motive. At the outset he was in a passive situation, he was overpowered by the experience; but, by repeating it, unpleasurable though it was, as a game, he took on an active part. These efforts might be put down to an instinct for mastery that was acting independently of whether the memory was in itself pleasurable or not. But still another interpretation may be attempted. Throwing away the object so that it was 'gone' might satisfy an impulse of the child's, which was suppressed in his actual life, to revenge himself on his mother for going away from him. In that case it would have a defiant meaning: 'All right, then, go away! I don't need you. I'm sending you away myself.' A year later, the same boy whom I had observed at his first game used to take a toy, if he was angry with it, and throw it on the floor, exclaiming: '<span style="font-style: italic;">Go to the fwont</span>!' He had heard at that time that his absent father was 'at the front', and was far from regretting his absence; on the contrary he made it quite clear that he had no desire to be disturbed in his sole possession of his mother. We know of other children who liked to express similar hostile impulses by throwing away objects instead of persons. We are therefore left in doubt as to whether the impulse to work over in the mind some overpowering experience so as to make oneself master of it can find expression as a primary event, and independently of the pleasure principle. For, in the case we have been discussing, the child may, after all, only have been able to repeat his unpleasant experience in play because the repetition carried along with it a yield of pleasure of another sort but none the less a direct one.<br />
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Nor shall we be helped in our hesitation between these two views by further considering children's play. It is clear that in their play children repeat everything that has made a great impression on them in real life, and that in doing so they <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abreaction">abreact</a> the strength of the impression and, as one might put it, make themselves master of the situation. But on the other hand it is obvious that all their play is influenced by a wish that dominates them the whole time, the wish to be grown-up and to be able to do what grown-up people do. It can also be observed that the unpleasurable nature of an experience does not always unsuit it for play. If the doctor looks down a child's throat or carries out some small operation on him, we may be quite sure that these frightening experiences will be the subject of the next game; but we must not in that connection overlook the fact that there is a yield of pleasure from another source. As the child passes over from the passivity of the experience to the activity of the game, he hands on the disagreeable experience to one of his playmates and in this way revenges himself on a substitute.<br />
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Nevertheless, it emerges from this discussion that there is no need to assume the existence of a special imitative instinct in order to provide a motive for play. Finally, a reminder may be added that the artistic play and artistic imitation carried out by adults, which, unlike children's, are aimed at an audience, do not spare the spectators (for instance, in tragedy) the most painful experiences and can yet be felt by them as highly enjoyable. This is convincing proof that, even under the dominance of the pleasure principle, there are ways and means enough of making what is in itself unpleasurable into a subject to be recollected and worked over in the mind. The consideration of these cases and situations, which have a yield of pleasure as their final outcome, should be undertaken by some system of aesthetics with an economic approach to its subject-matter. They are of no use for our purposes, since they presuppose the existence and dominance of the pleasure principle; they give no evidence of the operation of tendencies beyond the pleasure principle, that is, of tendencies more primitive than it and independent of it.<br />
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(1) A further observation subsequently confirmed this interpretation fully. One day the child's mother had been away for several hours and on her return was met with the words 'Baby o-o~o!' which was at first incomprehensible. It soon turned out, however, that during this long period of solitude the child had found a method of making himself disappear. He had discovered his reflection in a full-length mirror which did not quite reach to the ground, so that by crouching down he could make his mirror-image 'gone'."<br />
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(Sigmund Freud, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," The Freud Reader, W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 1989, pages 599-601)Professor Estevezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16089916647553501445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9113573251204421567.post-16493389125667574262015-11-10T12:18:00.002-05:002015-11-10T12:18:52.157-05:00Thanatos: Beyond the Pleasure Principle<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyaFqyF_W9skRrpavvX7OmPvsJUzahaZ0brdyNsPqpyaaRWDorEXUcbm4gbWs23cdI2lSUhAla51Yzw1hRc144xGlj8r_LAt10u0k7X_bD2uhiMx153vvQycCQWwSelqXs3afLwcFl4JE/s1600-h/54766-480-561.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyaFqyF_W9skRrpavvX7OmPvsJUzahaZ0brdyNsPqpyaaRWDorEXUcbm4gbWs23cdI2lSUhAla51Yzw1hRc144xGlj8r_LAt10u0k7X_bD2uhiMx153vvQycCQWwSelqXs3afLwcFl4JE/s320/54766-480-561.jpg" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5266753243054936610" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 320px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 274px;" /></a>In <span style="font-style: italic;">Beyond the Pleasure Principle</span>, Freud modified his earlier model of psychic economy in which “the pleasure principle” (and its repression/sublimation) is the central force propelling human action, behavior and development. In this essay Freud sketches out a new theory of drives by adding “the death drive” (called “Thanatos,” in complement to “Eros” by Freud’s students). <span style="font-style: italic;">Beyond the Pleasure Principle</span> produces a striking portrait of the human psyche as struggling between two opposing forces: Eros, the progressive drive toward sexual and pan-sexual pleasure, creativity and harmony; Thanatos, the regressive pull of repetition, compulsion, aggression and self-destruction.<br />
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<span style="font-style: italic;">Beyond the Pleasure Principle</span> was born out of Freud’s work with victims of trauma--specifically the traumatized soldiers returning from World War I. In fact, one of the cultural effects of the Great War was a growing popular recognition of the existence of psychological damage itself: that one could be as debilitated by mental trauma as physical injury. Freud observed that his patients often tended to repeat or re-enact these traumatic experiences, in symbolic or displaced forms, a seemingly paradoxical phenomenon that he termed repetition compulsion. Such compulsive repetition of the unpleasurable appeared to contradict the pleasure principle. In his further reflection on the phenomena, Freud noticed this repetition of unpleasant events could be found even in other circumstances like the play of children, as elaborated in his famous description of the fort / da game of his grandson. It is clear from this example that, at least on one level, such repetition compulsion is born from and can produce a positive and healthy attempt to deal with trauma by regaining control over a situation where previously one had none.<br />
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While Freud believed that in many cases we repeat traumatic events in order to master them after the fact, this is not the only motive or result of a drive away from pleasure. Freud began to distinguish a deeper masochism, a process that involves the drives turning against the self. Freud postulated the existence of a fundamental death drive that would counterbalance the tendency of beings to do only what they find pleasurable. According to this idea, organisms are driven to return to a pre-organic, inanimate state: to seek to withdraw from the anxiety of life (movement) in stillness and death.Professor Estevezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16089916647553501445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9113573251204421567.post-43854106554915004432015-10-29T10:35:00.000-04:002015-10-29T10:35:01.790-04:00Works cited<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMB25PmkQQ0qf-nDcA2e9pL4pxhdP0n9aIXbtSSaT3NxTWi_AZzCNeKOc3kBvDDCxEedX3c4K2kfXR_-KXq31wXAGv-undJnxE8FR8X9pOqtZGqm0jbl_BRU719dRwLFPnQYFsGRMLfJA/s1600-h/2260142101_97c6136bbb_o.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5263386845054740082" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMB25PmkQQ0qf-nDcA2e9pL4pxhdP0n9aIXbtSSaT3NxTWi_AZzCNeKOc3kBvDDCxEedX3c4K2kfXR_-KXq31wXAGv-undJnxE8FR8X9pOqtZGqm0jbl_BRU719dRwLFPnQYFsGRMLfJA/s320/2260142101_97c6136bbb_o.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 213px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 320px;" /></a><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: 100%;">Here is the protocol to follow with papers for this class. A good practice is to always ask the professor to provide an example of how they would like citations referenced---although citing practices are becoming more streamlined and more consistent across the disciplines, there are still some differences in style guides and citation procedures (if you are publishing an article, the journal or editor will always provide you with a style sheet to follow).<br /><br />Embedded citations (used in MLA style) are nice and simple. For an embedded citation, you simply put a parenthetical reference to the work from where you got your information. This information may have been paraphrased or directly quoted; either way, the information is not your original work and must be attributed to its author.<br /><br />The idea of parenthetical references is to keep the flow of the paper as smooth as possible and make it easy for the reader to find the reference in your Works Cited page at the end of your essay. Your Works Cited page will list all your references in alphabetical order by author's last name (or title in the case of work with no author given).<br /><br />Thus, if you have mentioned the author in your writing, you simply cite the page number, if you have not, then you cite both author's last name and page number. For example:<br /><br />In the opening of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Turn of the Screw</span>, Douglas remarks, "The story won't tell...not in any literal or vulgar way." (James, 5)<br /><br />At the beginning of James's novel, Douglas remarks, "The story won't tell...not in any literal or vulgar way." (5)<br /><br />If you don't have an author to cite, use a shortened form of the work's title.<br /><br />In organizing your Works Cited page, follow these examples (MLA style):<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Book:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: courier new;">Lastname, Firstname. </span><span style="font-family: courier new; font-style: italic;">Title.</span><span style="font-family: courier new;"> City: Publisher, Date.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Essay in a Book of Essays:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: courier new;">Lastname, Firstname. "Title of Essay." <span style="font-style: italic;">Title of Book.</span> Editor's Firstname Lastname. City: Publisher, Date.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Periodical:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: courier new;">Lastname, Firstname. "Title." Periodical day month year.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Journal:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: courier new;">Lastname, Firstname. "Title." Journal volume (year). </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: 100%;"><br /><b>Web page (blogs and other online sources): </b>Web page<b> </b>format and content vary widely. Use the following guidelines (blogger software will not allow me to type the term "URL" enclosed in <> marks. But that is the format you should follow):</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: 100%;"><b>General:</b></span> <span style="font-family: Courier New; font-size: 100%;"><br /><br />Lastname, Firstname. "Article Title." <i>Site Name</i>. Organization name if pertinent. Article date. Date of access<url><span style="font-weight: bold;">.</span> End with URL enclosed in <> marks</url></span><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: 100%;"><b></b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: 100%;"><b><br /></b><b>With no author and no page date:</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: 100%;"><b> </b></span><span style="font-family: Courier New; font-size: 100%;">"Article Title." <i>Site Name</i>. Organization name if pertinent. Date of access. End with URL enclosed in <> marks <url> <url></url></url></span><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: 100%;"><b></b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: 100%;"><b><br /></b><b>Site with no site name:</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: 100%;"><b> </b></span> <br />
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<span style="font-family: courier new; font-size: 100%;">Lastname, Firstname. "Article Title." </span><span style="font-family: courier new; font-size: 100%;"><i>Home Page.</i></span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><span style="font-family: courier new;"> Article date. Date of Access</span><url><span style="font-family: courier new;">. End with URL enclosed in <> marks </span></url></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;"><url><span style="font-family: courier new;"> </span><url></url></url></span> </div>
<span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: 100%;">Note: If there are no page numbers, as is usual with Web documents, do not make up one or use the number one (as in "Jones 1") to cover the whole document. Use a number only when there is a number.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: 100%;"><b>Class materials with no publication information/page numbers/other data:</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: 100%;">Craft a citation using the information you have; you will at least have author's name and the title of the story or essay.<br /><br />I think this covers all the situations you will encounter in writing this paper. <br /><br />For any other questions you may have, feel free to ask.</span>Professor Estevezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16089916647553501445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9113573251204421567.post-1409003252938605122015-10-15T12:13:00.000-04:002015-10-15T12:13:15.094-04:00First Essay: The Turn of the Screw and the Uncanny<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgW2rJETnj9Ojckgj03pM9IpVOuBKgMajz5XdCzdXpeD_5HB3kAbATxU68AcaBhM8AmzzehQrzD2_1KdlSfioAKH6hV1waJRsuj2Qr_E-14p5leIjITppIo7TzKy8Z0xAImBMsV26_4yng/s1600/behind+the+reader2.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5662965516403120978" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgW2rJETnj9Ojckgj03pM9IpVOuBKgMajz5XdCzdXpeD_5HB3kAbATxU68AcaBhM8AmzzehQrzD2_1KdlSfioAKH6hV1waJRsuj2Qr_E-14p5leIjITppIo7TzKy8Z0xAImBMsV26_4yng/s400/behind+the+reader2.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 338px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></a><br />
In our last class, some students asked that I post the first essay assignment now, although we haven't yet begun to explore <i>The Turn of the Screw</i> to any great degree. I think that's a good idea, too, because we can use the questions posed in the assignment to guide our discussion in the coming weeks.<br />
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Discuss Henry James' novella, <i>The Turn of the Screw</i> as an instance of the Freudian Uncanny. Can you see similar or parallel elements in this narrative to those Freud finds in "The Sandman" and his further definitions of the category, "<span style="font-style: italic;">das Unheimlich</span>," in his essay?<br />
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Think about how Freud investigates the Uncanny. He describes many features of this estranging effect; his discussion of the concept centers on examples of doubling, repetition, ambiguity, above all the unfamiliar face of the familiar. His first move in his essay is to demonstrate the <span style="font-style: italic;">unheimlich</span> hidden in the <span style="font-style: italic;">heimlich</span>: the uncanny in the "home-ly." In this way he connects the Uncanny with the <span style="font-style: italic;">return of the repressed</span>:<br />
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"It may be that the Uncanny (the 'unhomely') is something familiar ('homely', 'homey') that has been repressed and then reappears, and that everything uncanny satisfies this condition...I believe that it...can be traced back every time to something that was once familar and then repressed..."<br />
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Freud also associates the Uncanny with Oedipal anxiety; he pays particular attention to "The Sandman" as a story about Fathers and Children.<br />
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What is the return of the familiar, the homely in <i>The Turn of the Screw</i>? The unfamiliar familiar? The hidden familiar? Family and familiar share the same root and indeed a family, a displaced and disrupted family is at the heart of <i>The Turn of the Screw</i>. We have two children and three sets of parents----the children's biological parents, the surrogate parental couple of Jessel and Quint, and the Master and the Governess. Four of the six are dead; of the two living, one has abdicated his (legal, biological) position entirely and given the other an absolute authority. The Governess <span style="font-style: italic;">is</span> The Father in this case.<br />
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Also consider the way this "coupling" of characters sets up patterns of repetition and doubling: Quint/the Master, Jessel/the Governess, the Governess/Quint. Although the Governess's story is premised on a clear distinction between Good and Evil, the various similarities in situation and activity between the Governess and the Ghosts blur those lines and render motive and meaning ambiguous.<br />
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Finally, this is a story established at the beginning as one which "won't tell, not in any literal or vulgar way." In other words, this is a story of suggestion rather than revelation, of "evidence" that can be construed in multiple directions, of questions that can be entertained but never assigned a final answer. Literary critic J. Hillis Miller commented on <i>The Turn of the Screw</i>, "The words on the page work infallibly as speech acts forcing the reader...against his or her will, to "read into" the words meanings that are not there. The reader will fill the blanks out of his or her imagination and so be responsible for whatever evil thoughts he or she may have."<br />
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This assignment should be very simple on one level and very challenging on another. Think of this first paper as a trial run: a place to “try out” some of the ideas we’ve been talking about in class, a place to try out new ideas and observational skills. Think about how Freud's essay illuminates James's novella. Do not perform a literal and vulgar "Freudian" reading: i.e., do not attempt to "psychoanalyze" the Governess and "solve" her "case." <br />
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And don’t forget to title your essay. A title is one of the elements which distinguishes a piece of formal writing from an informal series of notes. Your title should reflect something pertinent to your discussion. "Paper One," "Essay," "Freud Paper," and the like are not adequate essay titles. Neither is the title of the novel you are writing about.<br />
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Length: 4 1/2 to 5 typewritten double-spaced pages.<br />
All papers must be stapled or they will not be accepted.<br />
Due: Monday, November 2Professor Estevezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16089916647553501445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9113573251204421567.post-23540013198432487542015-10-12T09:13:00.001-04:002015-10-12T09:13:17.604-04:00The Victorian Cult of the Child: Innocence and Experience, Ignorance and Knowledge<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj619QuehPwJ1XkK0oKuNXutf8tlyJHx1frs1r147WgK-7X0ts6Zqe8CUZShPB8JGUsga3HuVtnD9CadyZO24JvVwqsOjV-VHMI2pTHM6CnQ0ZlSaTYFS-TRlqcJsr5qnA4NAOyWxKjDvI/s1600-h/1424332355_ba228e25d7_o.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5256802783200321362" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj619QuehPwJ1XkK0oKuNXutf8tlyJHx1frs1r147WgK-7X0ts6Zqe8CUZShPB8JGUsga3HuVtnD9CadyZO24JvVwqsOjV-VHMI2pTHM6CnQ0ZlSaTYFS-TRlqcJsr5qnA4NAOyWxKjDvI/s320/1424332355_ba228e25d7_o.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEv0XFdQCWzHWjUjytM1i4nspTCqtDrifd4i6FMoHCKCclhg8w52NedSe1F-Ke9LqTN7vLL4w6U2BKwSzkkkUJPE_8WmLZIZLpIlaeZAE3EH2jXGVvaYj6B_cNl0pJRIT_yOKWYsRZKi0/s1600-h/414px-Alice_Liddell_2.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5256802697023549490" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEv0XFdQCWzHWjUjytM1i4nspTCqtDrifd4i6FMoHCKCclhg8w52NedSe1F-Ke9LqTN7vLL4w6U2BKwSzkkkUJPE_8WmLZIZLpIlaeZAE3EH2jXGVvaYj6B_cNl0pJRIT_yOKWYsRZKi0/s320/414px-Alice_Liddell_2.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a>Above are two images that illustrate aspects of Victorian beliefs about children and childhood. The first, "The Child Enthroned," pretty much says it all in its title. This 1894 painting by Thomas Cooper Gotch was wildly popular as an expression of "the child" as a quasi-divine icon. The second is a photograph of Alice Liddell by the Rev. Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll. To our modern eyes, this image looks seductive and likely a bit sexualized. Yet both are rather mainstream images which would have been read as exemplars of childhood innocence by Victorian eyes.<br />
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According to the Victorian ideal, the child was viewed not as a miniature adult, as children had been perceived in an earlier era, but as innocents who were to enjoy a life of carefree happiness until old enough to assume the responsibilities of (a gendered) adult life. But for Victorians, the moral category of "innocence" was defined by <span style="font-style: italic;">ignorance.</span> Well-bred young ladies and adult women were also expected to be "innocent" and childlike (in fact, both women and children occupied the same legal status in Victorian England as non-competent dependents) and this meant being in large part ignorant of the "brutal" sphere of public life (work, commerce, people from outside one's own genteel class). For children, innocence and moral purity was defined by their ignorance of adult life and adult knowledge. Above all childhood innocence was premised on a lack of sexuality: the child was seen not so much as a pre-sexual creature, but by definition, an asexual one. This is why Lewis Carroll's child photography---including nude studies that seem "obviously pedophiliac" to contemporary eyes---did not ring any alarm bells among Victorian parents who not only permitted, but were often present, during sittings.<br />
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Of course it goes without saying that all this angelic innocence and purity applies only to <span style="font-style: italic;">well-bred</span> children, the offspring of ladies and gentleman. The spawn of the working classes were quite another thing indeed. <a href="http://www.learningcurve.gov.uk/victorianbritain/industrial/source4.htm">(Here</a> you can read about their pre-child-labor law innocence--don't miss the affidavits from child miners who started working at around age five). These images<br />
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contrast sharply with these<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPdcV5GZeaTphNhTc7OKOCByUbj5z99LOXbesxzqkRvG-XLqSFVOyVuN0RkuX3AqD1xjmm7I5wH35nwWWNF57qHjnOJNx06VP6XoQkaxjqlUp0zyU4Bies_w56Yz_qBESZCEetTPSmwhxB/s1600/coal.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="255" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPdcV5GZeaTphNhTc7OKOCByUbj5z99LOXbesxzqkRvG-XLqSFVOyVuN0RkuX3AqD1xjmm7I5wH35nwWWNF57qHjnOJNx06VP6XoQkaxjqlUp0zyU4Bies_w56Yz_qBESZCEetTPSmwhxB/s320/coal.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3j-nf74NXGmUxcVr5fRsnwM6oGK41jNbrQsCnAiHJN0WJcJkFG4yFf94SV1Xwp33Oq1J35ZZEobtVJQ4kIWHp_w9G2Ms_wxbjpZ8mN73aWpnYkVmRZPQ5LPjEfsBYpe0M2mMTnDuetmww/s1600/photo03.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="312" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3j-nf74NXGmUxcVr5fRsnwM6oGK41jNbrQsCnAiHJN0WJcJkFG4yFf94SV1Xwp33Oq1J35ZZEobtVJQ4kIWHp_w9G2Ms_wxbjpZ8mN73aWpnYkVmRZPQ5LPjEfsBYpe0M2mMTnDuetmww/s320/photo03.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
this portrait<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6woOMFTyGiuuUfqE0e7yVeipzfmNsyNK5-Kvp1EvQeSbTnfhqUfkIJrJP0TNSGGK_vDOkluDPUzQ7Us2_XkJy8tOQRIlr9X5KBTEAIoxRyq5032nDrTG0RaIcs1uLbq0O7BDAwM5qR4_q/s1600/Ernest_and_Maggie,_by_Julia_Margaret_Cameron.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6woOMFTyGiuuUfqE0e7yVeipzfmNsyNK5-Kvp1EvQeSbTnfhqUfkIJrJP0TNSGGK_vDOkluDPUzQ7Us2_XkJy8tOQRIlr9X5KBTEAIoxRyq5032nDrTG0RaIcs1uLbq0O7BDAwM5qR4_q/s320/Ernest_and_Maggie,_by_Julia_Margaret_Cameron.jpg" width="269" /></a></div>
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with this one<br />
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Looking at Miles and Flora again, then, may reveal why they would be such disconcerting figures to their original audience: while they are no more intelligent than the average children of their class, they are <span style="font-style: italic;">knowing. </span>Tainted by access to (adult) knowledge, they are no longer <span style="font-style: italic;">ignorant</span> and therefore no longer <span style="font-style: italic;">innocent.</span><br />
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Here is a review from <span style="font-style: italic;">The American Monthly Review of Reviews</span>, December 1898, which expresses unease with having children as fictive figures of "evil:"<br />
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"The malignant spirit is worsted, but the price of victory is death. There is something really great in the story and assuredly the skill is superb. But surely we are not merely sentimentalists in our protest again children being made pawns in this horrible contest."<br />
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The Outlook (October 29, 1898) finds: "The story itself is distinctly repulsive."<br />
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And a reviewer in the New York weekly, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Independent</span>, January 5, 1899, is more adamant in his disgust:<br />
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"<span style="font-style: italic;">The Turn of the Screw</span> is the most hopelessly evil story that we have ever read in any literature, ancient or modern. How Mr. James could, or how any man or woman could, choose to make such a study of infernal human debauchery, for it is nothing else, is unaccountable...The study, while it exhibits Mr. James's genius in a powerful light, affects the reader with a disgust that is not to be expressed. The feeling after perusal of this horrible story is that one has been assisting in an outrage upon the holiest and sweetest fountain of human innocence, and helping to debauch---at least by helplessly standing by---the pure and trusting nature of children. Human imagination can go no further into infamy, literary art could not be used with more refined subtlety of spiritual defilement."<br />
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While this probably reads to us as a distinctly over-the-top reaction to <span style="font-style: italic;">The Turn of the Screw</span>, we should also remember that a similarly scandalized reaction first greeted Freud's initial theories of children's development because they were premised on both <span style="font-style: italic;">the existence</span> of childhood desire and sexuality and its <span style="font-style: italic;">naturalness.</span>Professor Estevezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16089916647553501445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9113573251204421567.post-7617602713089034972015-10-12T09:11:00.000-04:002015-10-12T09:11:03.841-04:00The Victorian Governess<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLeFH0VM0LkQNzju2oRF9pNpZS4XnDOm9aR-P1w69szePpUDamvERYF-MmswliW83IRUCcpIm-XfD7TsgmN2zwfsz1C-TDMz3ZEMPHS_D2KIe8XKckSN6W6l0_T4jiuVwFhfPSOm4Hmu4/s1600-h/2.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5253858485580405058" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLeFH0VM0LkQNzju2oRF9pNpZS4XnDOm9aR-P1w69szePpUDamvERYF-MmswliW83IRUCcpIm-XfD7TsgmN2zwfsz1C-TDMz3ZEMPHS_D2KIe8XKckSN6W6l0_T4jiuVwFhfPSOm4Hmu4/s320/2.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a>The heart of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Turn of the Screw</span> is a manuscript written by a governess about a singular experience in her employment. In order to appreciate the position from which she is writing, indeed, the position from which she is making sense of the experiences themselves, a quick look at the historical position of the Victorian governess is absolutely essential. <br />
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Because she was neither family member nor working class servant, the governess held a peculiar and ill-defined role in Victorian society, a society which found middle-class female employment problematic. The only time a woman of genteel birth was justified in seeking employment was if she found herself in financial distress and had no male relatives to give her support. The governess was usually a lady forced to support herself because of her father’s death or financial ruin. While it was paid work, it was “respectable” labour. In the gender-appropriate domestic sphere and among the respectable classes, she was kept from contact with the vulgar and “common” world of working class employment. But because she was nevertheless employed, her social status was lessened. Definitely not a servant nor a menial, she was nevertheless not quite a class equal of her employers. In fact, aristocratic and middle-class Victorians were often not sure how to treat the governess: while she was roughly from the same social class, her lack of financial stability made her their obvious inferior.<br />
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The governess occupied a grey area in the class hierarchy of the Victorian household: she was “above” the servants, but “below” the family. And in no area was her class dilemma more clear than in the attenuated marriage prospects of the governess. She would likely remain a spinster since she must not consort with men from inferior or superior classes.Professor Estevezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16089916647553501445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9113573251204421567.post-26159643288548770562015-10-05T18:56:00.002-04:002015-10-05T18:56:37.545-04:00The story won't tell: beginning "The Turn of the Screw"<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwWHzRLlVAOp_XJfmavNZcgHjw6eTG_Mn3Ye7Gk-H5hARyncGGuWnN9BCDzs3Npxqw7ZJA5_-l0mEX4ZNsVTEUQ1GmebK94bmPXlm1hixuzaRhpnLu4cKuAb77EdX4mpLQnrwq7j4vrjY/s1600-h/turnGraphicMain.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5253760434250441458" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwWHzRLlVAOp_XJfmavNZcgHjw6eTG_Mn3Ye7Gk-H5hARyncGGuWnN9BCDzs3Npxqw7ZJA5_-l0mEX4ZNsVTEUQ1GmebK94bmPXlm1hixuzaRhpnLu4cKuAb77EdX4mpLQnrwq7j4vrjY/s320/turnGraphicMain.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
In the framing prologue there are several statements which seem to prefigure what kind of story we will read. The tale is categorized as a "ghost story," and yet distanced from that facile label: "It's beyond everything." In describing the governess's feelings for her employer, Douglas remarks that, "I saw it, and she saw I saw it; but neither of us spoke of it." This statement could sum up a great deal of the "action" of the story: a series of "knowing" looks where everything is, and isn't, said. The narrator suggests that any mystery will be cleared up once Douglas reads the manuscript aloud and that "The story will tell." But Douglas is quick to reply, "The story <span style="font-style: italic;">won't</span> tell...not in any literal vulgar way.<br />
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We begin, then, with a story which "won't tell," won't reveal. A story about a young woman hired under condition that she "but never, never...appeal or complain, nor write about anything."<br />
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This is a narrative of gaps and silences. Of letters whose contents are momentous, but of which we never exactly learn. A story of monstrous, shameful actions which are constantly hinted at, but never revealed.<br />
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It is also a story about a story---the prologue establishes that we are "hearing" a story through three sets of narrators: the governess (who has written her story down), Douglas (who reads the governess's manuscript aloud to the house guests) and the narrator who is transmitting to us "an exact transcript of my own made later." And this haunting story about the dead is "haunted" by death before it's even begun---not only has the governess died years before Douglas tells her story, but Douglas himself has died prior to the narrator's re-telling of the story read out to the "hushed little circle" of expectant listeners.<br />
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It is a story of returning presences--ghosts--and characters who replace/displace each other. The governess is initially hired as replacement, as a kind of double replacement for both the governess and the absent Master. Moreover, she is constantly stepping into the position of---replacing---both Miss Jessel and Quint (at the window, at her desk, sitting at the bottom of the stairs, standing on the shore of the pond, etc.)<br />
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It is also a story of people slipping out of their "proper places." Part of Quint's "evil" is that he overstepped or didn't know his place (he wore his master's clothes, he presumed relations with his betters). And part of Miss Jessel's "evil" is that she, too, "fell" from of her place through her alliance with a social inferior. And yet the governess, clearly marked as "not evil" in the (her) story, is also out of place, invested by the Master with a proxy authority well beyond a governess's traditional duties.<br />
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And finally, it is a story about...well, what is it a story about?Professor Estevezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16089916647553501445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9113573251204421567.post-60178572427914456702015-10-05T18:54:00.002-04:002015-10-05T18:54:19.459-04:00Turns of the screw...<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBWjMY6w-6MaGK19NvKajSUP-VkMwlPzBzDUhwS5gEVWUGp-PVNoLGOb4UFfHOvEOzwP5PjCNoOZ3Cu4R2BItQkrCkJRpDCWIE2sNcd6aPnbdecDsj5S22TlBL_vM8OVlNtOS6KgANXAw/s1600-h/TurnOfScrew_600x400.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5259778792187489474" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBWjMY6w-6MaGK19NvKajSUP-VkMwlPzBzDUhwS5gEVWUGp-PVNoLGOb4UFfHOvEOzwP5PjCNoOZ3Cu4R2BItQkrCkJRpDCWIE2sNcd6aPnbdecDsj5S22TlBL_vM8OVlNtOS6KgANXAw/s320/TurnOfScrew_600x400.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivoXy8g6QqOAVQV4SZ8mKeRlAcwYd9h4uu3Wt_KzV-xekL5Z1PUI25cffRwGhz6-VvheH73hyg5YKKBDUVyyA_jCzx3e5ZENYrVe5AdPfjBhiRXssRlDy4nnv-IlG45pFxiBsmD5mvooI/s1600-h/eno-screw.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5259778445050411634" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivoXy8g6QqOAVQV4SZ8mKeRlAcwYd9h4uu3Wt_KzV-xekL5Z1PUI25cffRwGhz6-VvheH73hyg5YKKBDUVyyA_jCzx3e5ZENYrVe5AdPfjBhiRXssRlDy4nnv-IlG45pFxiBsmD5mvooI/s320/eno-screw.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBZp3iYHKKM1bsv9fyqFN_RLxFEaV-a1USnBHiBZbAMiow1xel0M7EijqElZMqPBtzpPXiW5VCpTgsa_snvm1cbM2QImAzEgHjFTHkT4enKOSxRpXCKpZEORtDQ1F1Y-Ugf9p2-kUHTH0/s1600-h/innocentsth0.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5259778096046391970" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBZp3iYHKKM1bsv9fyqFN_RLxFEaV-a1USnBHiBZbAMiow1xel0M7EijqElZMqPBtzpPXiW5VCpTgsa_snvm1cbM2QImAzEgHjFTHkT4enKOSxRpXCKpZEORtDQ1F1Y-Ugf9p2-kUHTH0/s320/innocentsth0.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
As I spoke about in class, Henry James' <span style="font-style: italic;">The Turn of the Screw</span>, one of the most famous ghost stories is also a very ambiguous ghost story. And his novella is premised on many kinds of ambiguity: not only on the level of content (are the ghosts "really" there? what exactly is so terrifying about them?) but also form. James' story is presented as a manuscript written by a woman long dead,
read years later. James' use of this narrative frame creates a
distance between the events and our understanding of them. It’s so
ambiguous that there are questions about the questions.<br />
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As you might expect it has become a very popular text for literary scholars and critics to analyze. It's also been a very popular inspiration for other artists: there are countless film and theater treatments of the story.<br />
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After we discuss <i>The Turn of the Screw</i>, we'll be reading one of the more ambitious and fascinating responses to it, Joyce Carol Oates's short story, "Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly," a work which attempts to turn TOTS on its head, so to speak.<br />
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But the work has inspired many treatments, versions and responses. Here's a far from complete list of other works which derive from <span style="font-style: italic;">The Turn on the Screw</span>, many of which are more or less "faithful" adaptations for stage or sceen:<br />
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Benjamin Britten wrote an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turn_of_the_Screw_%28opera%29">opera</a> based on "The Turn of the Screw" in 1954.<br />
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<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053384/">A 1959 live television version starring Ingrid Bergman.</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title.jsp?stid=79253"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Innocents</span></a> (1961) with Deborah Kerr as the Governess and Michael Redgrave as The Uncle. Truman Capote worked on the script.<br />
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There's a <a href="http://www.moviesunlimited.com/musite/product.asp?sku=D37315">television version</a> with Lynn Redgrave as the Governess in 1974.<br />
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Shelley Duvall directed <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0186640/">a version</a> in 1989 for her television series, "Nightmare Classics" with Amy Irving as the Governess and Balthazar Getty as Miles.<br />
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<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105659/">A 1994 British version</a> with Patsy Kensit and Julian Sands updates the story to the 1960s.<br />
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A 1995 television version called <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113271/"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Haunting of Helen Walker</span></a> casts Valerie Bertinelli as the Governess.<br />
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<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0209440/">Another television adaptation</a>, in 1999, with Colin Firth as The Master.<br />
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A 1999 film adaptation <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0211577/fullcredits#cast"><span style="font-style: italic;">Presence of Mind</span></a> with Sadie Frost as the Governess, Harvey Keitel as the Master (!), Jude Law as The Secretary (!!?) and Lauren Bacall as Mrs. Grose (!!!!!!!)<br />
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The 2006 horror/thriller <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_a_Dark_Place"><span style="font-style: italic;">In a Dark Place</span></a> is another TOTS adaptation, giving the story a contemporary setting.<br />
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Allegedly, the 2001 Nicole Kidman film, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0230600/"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Others</span></a> is a TOTS version...but not very TOTS-y.<br />
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And probably the strangest film treatment I've come across is a 1971 <span style="font-style: italic;">prequel</span> (!) to TOTS, <a href="http://www.popmatters.com/pm/review/46589/the-nightcomers"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Nightcomers</span></a> with Marlon Brando as a small-animal-torturing, BDSM Peter Quint. I'll have to try to track this one down soon.Professor Estevezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16089916647553501445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9113573251204421567.post-15136170617036988652015-10-05T18:40:00.002-04:002015-10-05T18:40:15.454-04:00The Return of the Sandman<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEir34jaFPZBHr140vFMjr7qLgKie1hW3Cn5sKspZCaFtInSfUn354CiMB7hEjaIx28qeDJiU2yCrV41Qcp1IpzoL9aCylvUDePWvxerKaLPPAqL8rCm72tLY7Ml1oBak5z6ZQ02LB1Hsc4/s1600-h/MAKE_685.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5250508835699987682" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEir34jaFPZBHr140vFMjr7qLgKie1hW3Cn5sKspZCaFtInSfUn354CiMB7hEjaIx28qeDJiU2yCrV41Qcp1IpzoL9aCylvUDePWvxerKaLPPAqL8rCm72tLY7Ml1oBak5z6ZQ02LB1Hsc4/s320/MAKE_685.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0m0LehbTzgIiSPCbkvhSQ9YKINuqsXI-3lKdXcvS7E6zDkXMkfWWbACidk6zD0aZdMQW-U-nh5BshKM9ITJTRhcq3plXhlEckCZVrBOTYG1mgS40e_jnAJlravs_ldU0ZQI9jmAqCjhs/s1600-h/glass_eyes_diseased2.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5250508756056240882" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0m0LehbTzgIiSPCbkvhSQ9YKINuqsXI-3lKdXcvS7E6zDkXMkfWWbACidk6zD0aZdMQW-U-nh5BshKM9ITJTRhcq3plXhlEckCZVrBOTYG1mgS40e_jnAJlravs_ldU0ZQI9jmAqCjhs/s320/glass_eyes_diseased2.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a>A student once remarked that Hoffman's tale, "The Sandman," read like "a fairy tale for adults." I think this phrase is a good way to capture the fantastical and prosaic elements of the plot: on the one hand it's a story of tragic love affair, where the hero grows progressively out of touch with reality and descends into madness. On the other, it's a story filled with fantastical and implausible situations that are nevertheless real (that Nathaniel thinks Coppola is Coppelius is not just delusion, he actually <span style="font-style: italic;">is</span> the same man, the clockwork woman Olympia does exist, Nathaniel does encounter the same violent struggle between father figures twice, etc.) And at the crucial points where the fantastical and the real overlap, the story lapses into a narrative indeterminacy, making it impossible to finally resolve the story as either a realistic portrayal of madness or a purely symbolic allegory.<br />
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And that's the element of the story I want to highlight here: that the uncanny elements of the story are not just in the plot <span style="font-style: italic;">but also in the narrative structure. </span>The story is constructed in such a way that the reader is implicated in its uncanny effects.<br />
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As I remarked in class the story begins by drawing attention to its own formal features: it begins one way (an exchange of letters), but breaks off and begins again (the narrator interrupts and <span style="font-style: italic;">addresses the reader directly</span>). And each of these beginnings is kind of a false one---both begin by telling their audience (Nathaniel tells Lothaire, the narrator tells the reader) that the story really <span style="font-style: italic;">started elsewhere</span>, in other events beyond those that take place in the time sequence covered in the plot.<br />
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The motif of doubling, a striking feature of this story, further blurs the interpretive lines. Not only do some characters have dual natures or multiple identities---Nathaniel's Good Father is also an Occult Dabbler, Spanlanzi is both Respectable Professor and Occult Dabbler (and thus, resembles Nathaniel's Good Father), the Sandman is both Real and Fairytale, the Sandman-as-Fairytale has both benign and horrific versions---but nearly all the characters can be grouped in pairs of opposites which disclose a hidden bond or similarity. While Clara/Olympia are opposites as "real" and "artificial," they are "the same" as objects of Nathaniel's desire and are designated by the same term: automaton. So too, are Nathaniel and Olympia both opposite (real/fake) and the same: both are children of dual-natured fathers and victims of Coppelius's violence. Other pairings can be discussed in the same fashion; it is clear that i<u>n this narrative everything contains its opposite just as Freud discovered <span style="font-style: italic;">heimlich</span> in the etymology of its other---<span style="font-style: italic;">unheimlich</span>.</u><br />
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That the story is told in the third person, but nevertheless from Nathaniel's point of view, accounts for other problems of easy resolvability. Events are presented to the reader in a kind of simultaneously "objective" and "subjective" fashion. The most striking example, at least to me, is the first moment the reader tumbles into interpretive free fall: the story's Primal Scene. The revelation that greets Nathaniel---that the Sandman is real and moreover, not an unknown monster, but a familiar figure---is nothing compared to the reader's horror and shock when Coppelius roughly screws off Nathaniel's hands and feet and puts them back on again. Suddenly we don't know where we are; the incident breaks upon us without any textual warning as if we were reading an entirely different kind of story, or maybe had been all along. As Freud points out in his essay, "...Hoffmann already leaves us in doubt whether what we are witnessing is the first delirium of the panic-stricken boy, or a succession of events which are to be regarded in the story as being real." Thus, while we can try to resolve our confusion with a naturalistic explanation (i.e., this is something Nathaniel dreamed after he fainted in terror), such an explanation does not cancel out the anxious affect produced by the sequence. From this point on the reader is not just reading <span style="font-style: italic;">about</span> the uncanny, but is experiencing it.Professor Estevezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16089916647553501445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9113573251204421567.post-45081362303543627882015-10-05T10:00:00.002-04:002015-10-05T10:00:54.034-04:00The Sandman, a narrative of returns<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikj16xkZ8iN1KRgmnEJDDVeeqaiB9eAixd4BIDQy7qZexZKu9ibib2xMU5AaNTcesH9u4nKEhn9MPSf16xWpOyR0Sz0V8PPCWE4yWUkEwWoKRM_2A1IRaqE_zGJ0M2uqveKPWi1gpVt6E/s1600/returns.JPG" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5660990631835925906" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikj16xkZ8iN1KRgmnEJDDVeeqaiB9eAixd4BIDQy7qZexZKu9ibib2xMU5AaNTcesH9u4nKEhn9MPSf16xWpOyR0Sz0V8PPCWE4yWUkEwWoKRM_2A1IRaqE_zGJ0M2uqveKPWi1gpVt6E/s400/returns.JPG" style="display: block; height: 293px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></a><br />
Here's a slightly expanded version of the plot line I drew on the board in Monday's class in order to help us visualize how the narrative structure of "The Sandman" is predicated on return and repetition. This is partly how Freud builds his reading of the story as an enactment of the Return of the Repressed (as always, more on that concept later). But he is also interested in the way the various returns hinge on parent/child relationships. This might be a good avenue into our next work, Henry James' <span style="font-style: italic;">The Turn of the Screw</span> which is haunted by various combinations of families, none of them strictly "natural." And issues of sight, what exactly it is which we see with our mental and physical faculties, will also return.<br />
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(The diagram at the top of the post will enlarge if you click on it so you can read it better.)Professor Estevezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16089916647553501445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9113573251204421567.post-75111066650962523472015-09-30T12:14:00.001-04:002015-09-30T12:14:35.449-04:00The Sandmen<object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Mqcx6r57GRI&hl=en&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Mqcx6r57GRI&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" height="344" width="425"></embed></object><br />
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As mentioned in class, Hoffman's story, "The Sandman," has been adapted and used by many other writers and artists. The most well known uses are Offenbach's opera <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_contes_d%27Hoffmann"><span style="font-style: italic;">Tales of Hoffman</span></a> and the ballet <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copp%C3%A9lia"><span style="font-style: italic;">Coppelia</span></a>. More recently, its been the inspiration for the stop-action puppetry work (<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjgHbRrnjhU" style="font-style: italic;">The Sandman</a>) of British animator <a href="http://hydrocephalicbunny.blogspot.com/2006/11/paul-berry.html">Paul Berry</a> (who later went on to work with Tim Burton on <span style="font-style: italic;">The Nightmare Before Christmas</span>) and others like <a href="http://www.micro-film-magazine.com/Images/CUBlog%20Art/cu_knife003_sandmanposter.jpg">Split Pillow</a>'s production of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIA2kR5gF9w">Eye of the Sandman</a> and the above video, "The Sandman," a work in progress by Rich Ragsdale (channeling both <a href="http://www.weblogsinc.com/common/images/5573682046968882.JPG?0.5035096759679466">Fritz Lang</a> and <a href="http://jennafooj.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/simmonstongue.jpg">Gene Simmons</a>, it seems). It also inspired a recent "musical play"/concept album, <a href="http://www.residents.com/historical4/Vom/"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Voice of Midnight</span></a>, by the Residents, the San Francisco-based experimental musical group who have long performed anonymously in the guise of <a href="http://standanddeliver.blogs.com/photos/uncategorized/residentsphoto.jpg">giant eyeballs</a>...<br />
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Each one of these adaptations borrows different elements from the story: some focus on the Olympia part of the plot, some emphasize the eye-stealing menace of the monstrous Sandman.Professor Estevezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16089916647553501445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9113573251204421567.post-46432866844860782752015-09-21T19:37:00.000-04:002015-09-21T19:37:09.306-04:00Carnival of the Uncanny<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHP1F45YLakDUpAkJJN7jNcwE3S2zApBGovOEarjni7_M1eimzi5zZEgK_Ux3o5zx0yYyy2gKG4ERO78gYJJAPBwO8AGb2KXSTToqRpWNMky4GdiaeKUMtctE8o34_TnbJtprIfTv_Cok/s1600-h/the-uncanny-valley.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5248564241109871426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHP1F45YLakDUpAkJJN7jNcwE3S2zApBGovOEarjni7_M1eimzi5zZEgK_Ux3o5zx0yYyy2gKG4ERO78gYJJAPBwO8AGb2KXSTToqRpWNMky4GdiaeKUMtctE8o34_TnbJtprIfTv_Cok/s320/the-uncanny-valley.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqf6VXcPw4cOudA3u7pzXzZlh17rxhREyNrgVQYlX6yvJFnAZl30jjs6ldLZ5PW4zCV30cCQfxykxXVARz9rNJskElQRKHUY0QqqErWQN3uKCEJosci3r82z9x0ELFOtYRVh0LO3EHAJc/s1600-h/skull_pareidolia.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5248564138058570322" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqf6VXcPw4cOudA3u7pzXzZlh17rxhREyNrgVQYlX6yvJFnAZl30jjs6ldLZ5PW4zCV30cCQfxykxXVARz9rNJskElQRKHUY0QqqErWQN3uKCEJosci3r82z9x0ELFOtYRVh0LO3EHAJc/s320/skull_pareidolia.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxF0Kuk4UXNHFHgfC6JdCGF41DvlxRGbIs0jnsO_OfUgLUtWSXwqSM7fAwPROPgM5nu0wn_tCSSss8WP4gX25FQN1ZrPEYlJRPgAD0_A5d7-s-e0uEhCsOfeIwqnBkqx9iFgcyDwh2oRA/s1600-h/11.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5248564009727817890" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxF0Kuk4UXNHFHgfC6JdCGF41DvlxRGbIs0jnsO_OfUgLUtWSXwqSM7fAwPROPgM5nu0wn_tCSSss8WP4gX25FQN1ZrPEYlJRPgAD0_A5d7-s-e0uEhCsOfeIwqnBkqx9iFgcyDwh2oRA/s400/11.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a>Before we begin our discussion of Freud's essay and the <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/6e/Shortstory.png">short story</a> <a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_F94UifNStk8/SUY0hZYE-BI/AAAAAAAAAK0/46BWaXGsyzM/s400/double_eye_small.jpg">embedded</a> in it, <a href="http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/268718/ETA-Hoffmann">E. T. A. Hoffmann's</a> "<a href="http://www.newscientist.com/data/galleries/uncanny-valley/006081c9b0e.jpg">The Sandman,</a>" I wanted to post a <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e9/Bison_skull_pile_edit.jpg">jumble</a> of links and thoughts about this subject so we could have some fun, albeit some <a href="http://artguide.com.au/assets/art-hero/sphinxjpegdetail.jpg">uneasy</a>, <a href="http://www.boingboing.net/filesroot/200906061208.jpg">disquieting</a> and <a href="http://distortedarts.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/WoodmanFeelseries.jpg">dissonant pleasure</a>.<br />
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As you know already from the Glossary, the Uncanny refers to "an instance where something can be <a href="http://www.beastlyadventure.com/Kazahstan/Kazak50.jpg">familiar, yet foreign</a> at the same time, resulting in a feeling of the <a href="http://www.illusionspoint.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/scary-optical-illusion-21.jpg">uncomfortably strange</a>. Because the uncanny is <a href="http://www.andreaharner.com/BabyPufferFish.jpg">familiar</a>, yet <a href="http://archive.rhizome.org:8080/exhibition/montage/images/10_katchodourian.jpg">strange</a>, it often creates <a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XQyeHjfB0MI/Te4MXpJtmiI/AAAAAAAACrk/B3X2_-f1HJ4/s400/the+kiss+1982.jpg">cognitive dissonance</a> within <a href="http://www.altx.com/thebody/body.html">the experiencing subject</a> due to the paradoxical nature of being <a href="http://cuteoverload.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/54-e1279860371905.jpg?w=536&h=403">attracted</a> to, yet <a href="http://www.horsegroomingsupplies.com/horse-forums/attachments/off-topic/42501d1115849781-just-plain-disturbing-whoa.jpg">repulsed</a> by an <a href="http://www.craphound.com/images/w1kspidersquirrel.jpg">object at the same time</a>. Freud’s discussion of the concept centers on examples of <a href="http://actuphoto.com/files/news_17689_0.jpg">doubling</a>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jX3iLfcMDCw">repetition</a>, <a href="http://incubator.quasimondo.com/flash/islands_of_consciousness.php">seemingly meaningful patterns within coincidence</a>, the experience of <a href="http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/1682"><span style="font-style: italic;">deja-vu</span></a><a href="http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/1682">,</a> and the sometimes <a href="http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/gifs/ambigfig/ambigfig2.gif">ambiguous</a> <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/07/health_facing_up_to_death/img/2.jpg">boundary between life and death</a>, especially in relation to <a href="http://www.aimeemullins.com/gallery/photos/nicknight/nicknight3.jpg">artificial</a> <a href="http://www.cubo.cc/creepygirl/">animation</a>." With the Uncanny we enter the realm of <a href="http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Arts/Arts_/site_furniture/2007/09/06/gunthervonhagens460.jpg">dopplegangers</a>, <a href="http://parasci.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/friendly-ghost-poses-for-photograph.jpg">ghosts</a>,<a href="http://cdn.99rooms.com/99rooms.html"> indeterminacy</a>, <a href="http://favim.com/orig/201103/02/Favim.com-3544.jpg">automata</a>, <a href="http://ironcladfolly.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/sman2.jpg">ambiguity</a>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJtdojTD9iA">robots</a>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KF7488WHcok">hauntings</a>, <a href="http://37.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lia3pq7wpn1qfw86ao1_500.jpg">synchronicity</a> and <a href="http://skepdic.com/pareidol.html">pareidolia</a>. Meaning gone <a href="http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2006/04/29/i-psychoanalyze-ghosts/">strange</a>, <span style="text-decoration: underline;"> </span>everything <a href="http://k43.kn3.net/D47FDA263.jpg">just slightly</a>, <a href="http://brucearmstrong.net/graphics/doctored/horror5%20%28VERY%20disturbing.%20Hide%20the%20kids%27%20eyes%29.jpg">disturbingly</a>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0HncGNBCqY">askew</a>.Professor Estevezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16089916647553501445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9113573251204421567.post-23041381609758752872015-09-20T12:31:00.000-04:002015-09-20T12:31:26.049-04:00Introducing The Unconscious<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-krzV0YTPm-EezMNjtaUmkQqKpjAxrvZmTbKCtBaC2veGrWP9rC1-0XCWdYVZ1lXayU89PMmrboQKRD8zFX8uCsKUmj-RfYdkw0AaiuogmMnxBZACfJI69-7eerr3sdk7aI4NpB6hmbk/s1600-h/weeki_wachee+copy.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5248503743842708146" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-krzV0YTPm-EezMNjtaUmkQqKpjAxrvZmTbKCtBaC2veGrWP9rC1-0XCWdYVZ1lXayU89PMmrboQKRD8zFX8uCsKUmj-RfYdkw0AaiuogmMnxBZACfJI69-7eerr3sdk7aI4NpB6hmbk/s320/weeki_wachee+copy.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
I want to take some time to introduce Freud's concept of the Unconscious. It's important to spend effort on it because the Unconscious is the centerpiece of Freud's work, it's his greatest and most well known "discovery," and for that reason the one most likely to be encountered in simplified and watered-down versions. But if one is going to really find something useful in Freud, something that helps us see anew, then the estranging and challenging aspects of his theory need to emphasized and appreciated.<br />
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And instead of beginning my own summary here, I want to start in an indirect manner and through someone else's words (two moves that I hope by now register with you as "classic" Freudian gestures). I want to quote at length from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Haughton">Hugh Haughton</a>'s Introduction to our edition of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Uncanny</span>. Haughton's remarks double back to our previous work on dreams, and my previous post on the space shared by psychoanalysis and literature and in the process suggests the place of the Unconscious in this convergence.<br />
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"By presenting the dream as riddle, Freud presents himself as solving 'the essential riddles of dreaming.' By the same token, he given a new definition of consciousness in embattled relationship to the larger, more primary and largely unknown phenomenon he called 'the Unconscious.' In fact, dreams are works of art, born of a compromise between the conscious and unconscious. They can only be understood by sustained historical investigation into the imaginative life and memory of the dreamer...<br />
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Freud repeatedly represents himself, like Oedipus, as a solver of riddles, a writer faced with an apparently insoluble problem of meaning. The great founding texts of psychoanalysis...tackle human phenomena hitherto resistant to meaningful interpretation---hysterical symptoms, dreams, everyday slips of the tongue, jokes, and so-called sexual aberrations. He interprets all of them as riddling forms of meaning that can be decoded and deciphered. This involves showing that they are analogous to each other. Rather than seeing them as aberrant phenomena, he sees them as products of fundamental, central and normal psychic processes, processes that are 'unconscious.' Freud's theory of aberration seeks to demonstrate that enigmatic areas of language and behavior hitherto classified as being below, above, or beyond significance, are ultimately intelligible. They are subject to interpretation. In doing so, however, he affirms the fundamental ways in which the human mind in general---and not only the 'pathological' or 'abnormal' mind---is unintelligible or unknowable to itself. If psychoanalysis was invented as a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeneutics">hermeneutic</a> as much as a therapeutic practice, it is because it is founded on a double commitment to interpretation and resistance to interpretation. In his bid to make apparently anomalous human behavior intelligible, Freud was led to construct a theory which places unintelligibility at the heart of mental processes. In fact, in an astonishing transformation of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_Self">Cartesian</a> project, it made self-unintelligibility the paradoxical cornerstone of psychic identity. ...His master work, <a href="http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=M1afft7NY3AC&dq=the+interpretaiton+of+dreams&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=fZWdqgT4EW&sig=h-K4TQyBp1BW5e8XBJ-kA_V7SyQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=2&ct=result#PPA2,M1"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Interpretation of Dreams</span></a>, turned everyone's dreams into esoteric texts, the unacknowledged poetic masterpieces of everyday life. As Lionel Trilling said in a pioneering lecture, 'of all mental systems, the Freudian psychology is the one which makes poetry indigenous to the very condition of the mind.'" (ix-x)<br />
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Haughton's remarks return us to the first day of class where I remarked that Freud reads the human psyche like a poem, with a "literary" attention to the relation between form and content and extended examination of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trope_%28linguistics%29">rhetorical tropes</a> like metaphor and metonymy which layer and transform meaning. He also draws attention to the <span style="font-style: italic;">creative</span> aspects of the Unconscious---it produces, in effect, works of art---as well as its character as an ongoing process of subjectivity---he speaks of an "embattled" relation between the conscious and unconscious. Finally, he points out how radically different Freud's "split subject" is to the post-Renaissance notion of the individual which still informs much of way most people think of "the self."<br />
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For an example of how difficult it is to break with the notion of a "whole" self, consider the the classic "iceberg" model of the unconscious:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjK0TH-I84SVZFy957JAxQnzpzLe-fgoJwlQl4NSRh67lvVFVAETyxgGgIntLCGgurV4uWK5smA4YS9_Ak0TGED4e9FnFKUBZpU9hn0fhekaVBEKHZhtIhgytEG1ZsCu_EkZeA_wMvqRLkP/s1600/freudoh.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjK0TH-I84SVZFy957JAxQnzpzLe-fgoJwlQl4NSRh67lvVFVAETyxgGgIntLCGgurV4uWK5smA4YS9_Ak0TGED4e9FnFKUBZpU9hn0fhekaVBEKHZhtIhgytEG1ZsCu_EkZeA_wMvqRLkP/s320/freudoh.gif" width="298" /></a></div>
While alluding to Freud's topographic metaphor, this visualization unfortunately suggests that these psychic layers are just parts of the same whole. The unconscious may be submerged but it is still essentially connected to and part of the same overall structure. Now contrast that image with this:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoJmU5uBY_vpmAiMDpt-QMUsWNqu-jQOJrAQZfBfzsxp_sHj3mo1Q3kReyV9PpnJhZP7ju9PhNNm4rsF7ko4D7MTXsEPyVxkWJPlm0ioAzm1TZ79aAJAGfXmYM5pPVTrgM3J-LAOxEKCF-/s1600/24461977.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="318" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoJmU5uBY_vpmAiMDpt-QMUsWNqu-jQOJrAQZfBfzsxp_sHj3mo1Q3kReyV9PpnJhZP7ju9PhNNm4rsF7ko4D7MTXsEPyVxkWJPlm0ioAzm1TZ79aAJAGfXmYM5pPVTrgM3J-LAOxEKCF-/s320/24461977.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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In his <a href="http://www.human-nature.com/rmyoung/papers/gay.html">biography of Freud</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Gay">Peter Gay</a> references the above drawing<span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>by Austrian Expressionist <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Kubin">Alfred Kubin</a>. Titled <span style="font-style: italic;">Selbstbetrachtung</span> (<span style="font-style: italic;">Self-Observation</span>), Gay finds it an apt illustration of the violently disorienting idea of the self which Freud created in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Interpretation of Dreams</span>: a subject not just split, but seemingly severed from illusions (dreams) of wholeness and unity.<br />
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There are three aspects of Freud's model of the Unconscious that I think are the most fundamental to think about at this point:<br />
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<ul>
<li>What is the Unconscious and what is its function? This is basically a question of definition, but a tricky one because its hard to find a perfect metaphor or analogy for all the various characteristics Freud attributes to the Unconscious. Conventionally, it's usually described as a "place" a kind of "dumping ground" of traumatic memories or experiences, or a space "underneath" the conscious mind (a "sub" conscious). This, however, makes the Unconscious appear to be static, when in fact it is active. What makes it hard to produce a simple model is that the Unconscious is both "place" and "process." It is "where" traces of our past reside, but it is also the process through which our past desires and experiences come to shape our everyday lives (through processes of repression, sublimation and return). Its relation to the conscious mind is also paradoxical: although the two are intimately connected, they have no direct access to each other.</li>
</ul>
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<ul>
<li>How does the Unconscious come to be? We have briefly begun talking about Freud's theories of how a child acquires a "self," how it learns to be a social subject. One feature that distinguishes human beings from other animals is that we are born almost entirely helpless and dependent. We have very few "instincts;" in a sense we have to learn not just how to survive but how to be human. Freud is interested in the way the infant is born with a nearly limitless potential for bodily pleasure and the way that pleasures (desires) overlap, spring up with, or break off from, the satisfaction of needs (the oral pleasure of sucking is discovered while satisfying the need for nourishment, for example). For Freud, part of becoming a social subject involves the child learning to control and reign in an ever-growing assortment of desires, in effect learning to obey restrictions and limits and learning his place in the scheme of things. But what happens to those frustrated desires? All that excess "energy"? They are not only "stored" in the Unconscious, but acted upon by it: they are repressed (kept in check) or sublimated (channeled into socially acceptable activities).</li>
</ul>
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<ul>
<li>What are the consequences of the Unconscious? In other words what does it suggest about "the human mind" and what other ways of thinking about the human self does it challenge? As indicated in Haughton's remarks, the Freudian "split subject," the "de-centered self" challenges the traditional notion of a more or less stable and coherent self, the idea of a self-knowing consciousness. The impact of this is far-reaching, but for our purposes, I want to stress the way that Freud's theory puts signification, the act of producing our relations to the world via systems of symbolic representation, at the heart of human experience and civilization. It makes mankind's most essential identity that of Reader. And not just any reader, but a reader of Riddles, a reader of the ambiguous, the indirect, the puzzling...the uncanny....</li>
</ul>
Professor Estevezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16089916647553501445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9113573251204421567.post-42783958506143088492015-09-12T21:09:00.001-04:002015-09-12T21:09:16.820-04:00Essential dreaming...<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnfh1vXGJHIBBdxFQ68lvbUjiiZ2Aa3j-dfEg5QKBeVaj9PHKmUVBhuuL29j0lf-LKP75F22I9f-FhMBOEIVuwHBSNz7o3uyPbfzyJYkCXYWgnIdudnOyI5NakxUw4tJ9Bv3b-CRtwIvU/s1600-h/sl15.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5246396698368115730" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnfh1vXGJHIBBdxFQ68lvbUjiiZ2Aa3j-dfEg5QKBeVaj9PHKmUVBhuuL29j0lf-LKP75F22I9f-FhMBOEIVuwHBSNz7o3uyPbfzyJYkCXYWgnIdudnOyI5NakxUw4tJ9Bv3b-CRtwIvU/s320/sl15.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
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In reading Freud's text, <span style="font-style: italic;">On Dreams</span>, I ask students to pay attention to not only <span style="font-style: italic;">what</span> Freud says, but <span style="font-style: italic;">how</span> he says it. In other words, to think about how this text offers not just an explanation and interpretation of dreams, but a theory of interpretation, of reading itself. <u>For Freud, psychoanalysis <span style="font-style: italic;">is</span> reading.</u> All the various components of the psyche constitute a text: a series of signs that need to be assembled into a meaningful coherence or order, in other words, a narrative.<br />
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One of the distinctive features of Freud's text is its repetitive structure. Rather than organizing his argument in a linear fashion, Freud seemed to favor a logic of <span style="font-style: italic;">narrative return</span>. I think this is significant, because as we read further and "unpack" more concepts we'll see a Freudian fascination with repetition, with structures of return, with repetition as a basic organizing principle of both experience and how we make sense of it.<br />
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A relation between reading and repetition is illustrated in Freud's approach to dream analysis. The specimen dream (the "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_d%27h%C3%B4te">table d'hote</a>" dream) is narrated, various associations (of similar experiences or situations) are recounted and then "returned" to the specimen dream and "re-narrated" into it. The process is then repeated with incremental progression--greater and greater understanding--upon each return. Thus, repetition doesn't necessarily signal stasis (staying in the same place, saying the same thing over and over again), but can also aid movement and progress.<br />
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What are the basic terms and concepts put forth in <span style="font-style: italic;">On Dreams</span>?<br />
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First, Freud asserts that dreams have a relation to waking life, they thus have meaning and significance. Broadly speaking, all dreams function as <span style="font-style: italic;">symbolic wish fulfillment</span>. Dreams somehow provide us a satisfaction reality denies us. But wish fulfillment is not as simple as it sounds. Some dreams are quite obvious in their meaning: Freud's example of the dreams of children illustrates simple desires frustrated in waking life fulfilled or "completed" by the dream narrative. One of his examples is the child who was not allowed to eat strawberries actually verbalizing her dream of gorging on them in baby talk: a clear night time fantasy that alleviates a day time frustration.<br />
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Other dreams however are not so transparent and even if they have an overall coherence, they don't seem connected with waking life and conscious desires (I dreamed my uncle died of a terrible illness, I saw it all, his sickness, his death, the funeral---but I love my uncle! And he's never been sick a day in his life? Why did I dream of this?) or seem to lack a coherent meaning or narrative structure (I was traveling through Manhattan, but it was somehow also San Francisco because I saw the Bay Bridge, and the Empire State building. My car kept falling apart, a door fell off, then a tire, but wait, it was my Dad's car! A snowstorm. Oh yeah, I left my car in the other parking lot. The snow parking lot. Where you park when it snows. Did I pay rent this month?)<br />
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Freud responds to these last two kinds with a model of the dream: dreams consist of both <span style="font-style: italic;">manifest</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">latent</span> content. <span style="font-style: italic;">Manifest content</span> refers to the details we remember of the dream when we wake--what we would consciously describe when recalling the dream. For Freud, the dream's complete meaning is not found in the manifest details. The manifest content is only a trace of the <span style="font-style: italic;">latent content</span>, the multiple, possibly contradictory or complex wishes, desires, anxieties, frustrations that are represented in partial, "coded" or disguised form by the manifest dream. (But why should desires need to be "disguised"? Why is the latent meaning presented so indirectly and obscurely? More on this later when we take up the concept of <span style="font-style: italic;">repression </span>and more completely make sense of Freud's notion of <span style="font-style: italic;">the Unconscious</span>).<br />
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The process by which the latent content is transformed into manifest content is what Freud terms the <span style="font-style: italic;">"dream work."</span> The primary mechanisms of the dream work are:<br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-style: italic;">Condensation</span>: the enormous work of compression carried out by the transformation of a great deal of latent content into a handful of manifest imagery. Two or more ideas, experiences, desires, situations, etc., are compressed into one, made to overlap by finding one or more traits that they share. Freud uses the example of photo superimposition to illustrate this, referring to geneticist <a href="http://galton.org/composite.htm">Francis Galton's</a> "<a href="http://adamsmithlives.blogs.com/photos/uncategorized/jews_photonews_1.jpg">composite photographs</a>" which layer photographic images in order to produce a combined image that stresses the shared or similar features of all the individuals represented. (While Galton's work is an early example of superimposition, it should be noted that he used these images as "evidence" for rather questionable notions of racial or criminal "types." Students may find the Galton-inspired work of contemporary photography <a href="http://nancyburson.com/composite-silver-prints/">Nancy Burson</a> a richer and more provocative use of composite photography. Her work not only references Galton's technique, but is a critique of the racist conclustions he drew from it. See for example, "<a href="http://clampart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Burson_Mankind-Hires.jpg">Mankind</a>" a composite of Asian, Caucasian, and Black, weighted according to current population statistics, or her interactive project, "<a href="http://nancyburson.com/human-race-machine/">The Human Race Machine</a>.") Condensation is essentially the rhetorical trope of <span style="font-style: italic;">metaphor</span>: meaning is created via (multiple) comparisons.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-style: italic;">Displacement</span>: the replacement of a particular element in the latent content by some other, peripherally related image in the manifest dream, often also coupled with an inversion of relative value or importance. Displacement can signal a shift in the importance of a thought or element in a dream when shifted from the latent to the manifest content. The trivial can become significant, and the significant trivial: a kind of transvaluation. Displacement is essentially the rhetorical trope of <span style="font-style: italic;">metonymy</span>: a figure of speech in which one word or phrase is substituted for another with which it is closely associated (such as "crown" for "royalty"). Both metaphor and metonymy involve the principle of substitution: one thing represents another. In metaphor, this substitution is based on similarity, while in metonymy, the substitution is based on contiguity.</li>
</ul>
There is of course, more that Freud says about things in <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">On Dreams </span>(the preponderence of visual images and symbols, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebus">rebus</a>-like <a href="http://www.fulltable.com/pz/im01/12.jpg">fusions of images and language</a>, the free-association technique used to tease out latent associations, the role of the dream instigator/residue of the day) but this summary gives us the basis for beginning to look at Freud's method as a theory of narrative and reading. Some things to think more on:<br />
<ul>
<li>how Freud reads the dream like a literary text, paying more attention to figurative meaning (metaphor, metonymy) than literal meaning</li>
<li>how meaning is produced through structures of repetition and substitution</li>
<li>how what is absent (latent) is as, or more, important than what is present (manifest); Freud reads what the dream "doesn't say" as well as what it "does say."</li>
</ul>
Professor Estevezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16089916647553501445noreply@blogger.com0