Syllabus
SCHEDULE 20 Feb The Unconscious: A Primer on Freud and Jung: introduction to psychoanalytic literary theory; 19th-century American society; Poe, “Shadow”; Hawthorne, “The Haunted Mind” 27 Feb The Buried Self: Poe, “The Premature Burial,” “Cask of Amontillado,” “Berenice,”
“The Fall of the House of Usher” 5 Mar The Ego, Id and Superego: Poe, “Imp of the Perverse,” “Tell-Tale Heart,” “Black Cat,” “Hop Frog,” “Murders of the Rue Morgue” 12 Mar The Double: Poe, “William Wilson,” “Man of the Crowd”; “Descent …into the Maelstrom” 19 Mar Our Shadow Selves: Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym 26 Mar Repression and Guilt: Hawthorne, “The Hollow of the Three Hills,” “The Wives of the Dead,” “The Minister’s Black Veil,” 2 Apr Repression and Guilt: Hawthorne, “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” “Wakefield,” “Young Goodman Brown” 9 Apr Expiation: Hawthorne, “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” “Alice Doane’s Appeal,” “Egotism” 16 Apr Imp of the Perverse: Hawthorne, “The Birth-Mark,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” “Ethan Brand” 23 Apr Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter 30 Apr Repression and Expression: Rebecca Davis, “The Wife’s Story,” Charlotte Gilman, “Yellow Wallpaper” (Moodle) 7 May Repression and Expression: Emily Dickinson, selected poems (Moodle) 14 May Repression and Self-Destruction: Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener”: Willa Cather, “Paul’s Case” (Moodle)
Annotation
David Hicks, PhD (New York University)
Fulbright Scholar in American Studies, Summer 2020
Professor of English, Director of MFA in Creative Writing, Regis University, Denver CO (USA) dhicks@regis.edu
Seminar: Thursdays 12:30-14:05, Room 111, two units per week
Office Hours: Thursdays 11:30-12:30, Room 219C, or by appointment
Objective: To study 19th-Century writers who were depicting the influence of the unconscious well before Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung would famously define and discuss it in the early 20th century. The authors we will study did not simply evince their understanding of their characters’ unconscious motivations, the metaphorical meanings of dreams, and the power of the “shadow” self, but brought these matters of the unconscious to the foreground as focal points and themes of their works.