Self-Analysis in Literary Study: Exploring Hidden Agendas

by Daniel Rancour-Laferriere

Overview

What makes one reader look for issues of social conformity in Kafka's Metamorphosis while another concentrates on the relationship between Gregor Samsa and his father?
Self-Analysis in Literary Study investigates how the psychoanalytic self-analysis enables readers to gain a deeper understanding of literature as well as themselves.
In the past scholars have largely ignored self-analysis as an aid to approaching literature. The contributors in Self-Analysis in Literary Study boldly explore how the psyche affects intellectual intellectual discovery in the realm of applied psychoanalysis.
Jeffrey Berman confronts a close friend's suicide through Camus and his student's diaries, kept for an English class. Language, family history, and an attachment to Kafka are addressed in David Bleich's essay. Barbara Ann Schapiro writes of her attraction to Virginia Woolf during her emotional senior year of college. Other essayists include Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, Norman N. Holland, Bernard J. Paris, Steven Rosen, and Michael Steig.
Written for both scholars in the fields of psychology and literature and for a general audience intrigued by self- analysis as a tool for gaining insight, Self-Analysis in Literary Study answers traditional questions about literature and raises challenging new ones.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814774397
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	10/01/1994
Series:	Literature and Psychoanalysis , #8
Pages:	230
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Daniel Rancour-Laferriere is Professor of Russian at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of many books, including The Slave Soul of Russia and Self-Analysis in Literary Study, both available from NYU Press.