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Psychological Complexity of the Human: Reflections in Literature, Art and Film

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Course Type Course Code No. Of Credits
Foundation Core SHS303838 2

Semester and Year Offered: Semester 4/ 2nd year of the MPhil programme

Course Coordinator and Team:AnshumitaPandey

Email of course coordinator:anshumita[at]aud[dot]ac[dot]in

Pre-requisites:Completion of theoretical courses of the first year.

Aim: The course aims to sensitize and acquaint students to the flow and depth that literature, cinema and art forms have to offer as they delve into the intricacies and complexities of the human psyche. It opens up the shared borders between psychoanalysis,the literary and visual arts for exploration and discussion. Thus routing itself through a critical engagement with forms of literary and artistic expression, it explores ‘the work of art’ in a dual sense: the specific nuances of literary and artistic pieces that imbue it with a pulsating evocative intensity as well as what each renders possible, sense-able by birthing critique and re-writing conditions of the possible. Through such bivalent engagement, the course aims to set up an interface between the domains of psychoanalysis and aesthetics while affirming the aesthetic-creative potential inherent to life.

Course Outcomes:By the end of the course, the student will be able to

  1. come to have an appreciation of literature, art and film as distinct mediums that story life-texts and contexts and learn to acknowledge their distinctive takes on questions of human subjectivity.
  2. articulate and critically locate the conceptual category of the aesthetic.
  3. appreciate and create a reflexive portrayal of the psyche as processual and creative.
  4. Translate themes of playing and creativity into everyday living by exploring life itself as work of art.

Brief description of modules/ Main modules

  • · Module 1: The Uncanny Interface: Psychoanalysis and Aesthetics
  • · Module 2: Writing as an aesthetic of the Self: Questions of Fiction and Biography
  • · Module 3: Art and the Unconscious: Breton, Ernst and The Surrealist Manifesto
  • · Module 4: The Author Function
  • · Module 5: The Receptive Unconscious :Receiving the human psyche through explorations in Literature, Art& Film
  • · Module 6: Meditations on the Aesthetic Dimension: The impulse to play and creative living

Assessment Details with weights:

  • Individual Presentations& Write up – 50%
  • Reflective writing – 50%

Reading List:

· Freud, S. (1917-19), Strachey, J. ed. (2001), The Uncanny, The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XII. Vintage Books: London

  • · Cixous, H. (1976), Fiction and its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche (The “Uncanny”), New Literary History, Vol. 7, No. 3, John Hopkins University Press.
  • · Johnson, B. (2014), ‘My Monster/ My Self’, A Life with Mary Shelley, Stanford University Press.
  • · Breton, A. (1972), Manifesto of Surrealism(1924), Manifestoes of Surrealism, University of Michigan Press.
  • · Rainbow, P (ed) (1984), Foucault, M, ‘What is an author?’, The Foucault Reader, Random House.
  • · Marcuse, H (1974), ‘The Aesthetic Dimension’, Eros and Civilization, Beacon Press, Boston, USA
  • · Deleuze, G. (1998), Literature and Life, Essays Critical and Clinical, Verso,UK
  • · Wild strawberries, Film, Ingmar Bergman, 1957
  • · Frankenstein, Film, Sam Hall & Dan Curtis, 1973
  • · Tariq Ali on Surrealism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5H39e_iYZqE
  • · Anne Umland on Max Ernst: How to see the artist (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWAzhHQKX5c)

ADDITIONAL REFERENCE:

  • · Freud, S. (1911-13), Strachey, J. ed. (2001), Remembering, Repeating and Working Through: The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XII. Vintage Books: London
  • · Bollas, C. (2007) The Freudian Moment. Karnac Books: London
  • · Kristeva, J (1980), ‘How does one speak to Literature?’, Desire in Language: A semiotic approach to Literature and Art, Columbia University Press, New York
  • · Kristeva, J (1980), ‘Novel as Polylogue’, Desire in Language: A semiotic approach to Literature and Art, Columbia University Press, New York
  • · Johnson, B. (2014), A Life with Mary Shelley, Stanford University Press.
  • · Felman, S. (2003), Writing and Madness: Literature, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, Stanford University Press.
  • · Marcuse, H (1974), ‘The Images of Orpheus and Narcissus’, Eros and Civilization, Beacon Press, Boston, USA
  • · Winnicott, DW (1971,) ‘Playing: Creative activity and the search for the self’, Playing and Reality,Tavistock Publications, 1971
  • Bollas, C (2008), The Evocative Object World, Routledge.
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