EGL 274 - Uncanny Texts: Literature and Psychoanalysis

Course Units: 1.0

By interrogating literary, cultural, and psychoanalytical texts, this course examines the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis; the two have been in close conversation since the early theoretical developments that began to define psychoanalysis. From Freud’s use of Hamlet and The Sandman as key cornerstones of his own theories to the way that J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone illustrates Jacques Lacan’s notion of the Mirror Stage, literature and psychoanalysis have been dialogically and dynamically intimate bedfellows. During our term, we will look at psychoanalytical writings by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and others in conjunction with transhistorical literary and cultural texts. We will examine specific psychoanalytical concepts like the unconscious, desire, sublimation, shame, the uncanny, the death drive, the primal horde, infantile sexuality, and mourning and melancholia. Prerequisite(s): One 100-level English course or a score of 5 on the AP English Language or Literature and Composition test. CC: HUL, HUM ISP: GSWS