Literary Criticism, Fall, 99;  Psychoanalysis;
Psychological Diseases

I. Oral Stage - first year of life ( --> 18 months)
II. Anal Stage (18 mo --> 3-5)
III. Phallic Stage (3-5 --> 6-8) , also Oedipal stage
IV. Latency Stage (6-8 --> puberty)
V. Genital Stage (puberty --> death)

A. Orals - have problems with dependency needs (theory of ulcer formation)
B. Anals - have problems with aggression - either overcontrol or undercontrol.
C. Phallics - have problems with sex & sexual identity
 

Title: the letters L.H.O.O.Q. when read aloud in French sound like: 'Elle a chaud au cul' and in English - they would be  read aloud as LOOK. )  Image: http://members.aol.com/mindwebart3/marcelpg2.htm from Marcel Duchamp page of Art Minimal & Conceptual Only "[Duchamp] turned Mona Lisa into a bearded lady, implying the bisexual character of Leonardo and himself, as well as the relation of Mona Lisa to Leonardo's unconscious fantasy of the phallic mother. " About the title: "The combination of bisexuality and bilingualisms evokes the unconscious equation of the mouth and tongue with the female and male genitals, respectively.  It is also consistent with  the mirror image of Look and Kool in the title" (Adams 189)

A. D. H. Lawrence's description of the story of Sons & Lovers is almost like that of his relationship with his mother.

A woman of character and refinement goes into the lower class, and has no satisfaction in her own life.  She has had a passion for her husband,  so the children are born of passion, and have heaps of vitality.  But as her sons grow up she selects them as lovers—first the eldest, then the second.  These sons are urged into life by their reciprocal love of their  mother—urged on and on.  But when they come to manhood, they can’t love, because their mother is the strongest power in their lives, and holds them. . . . The next son gets a woman who fights for his soul—fights his mother.  The son loves the mother—all the sons hate and are jealous of the father.  (Boulton 49)

This has been a kind of bond between me and my mother.  We have loved each other, almost with a husband and wife love, as well as filial and maternal.  We knew each other by instinct . . . We have been like one, so sensitive to each other that we never needed words.  It has been rather terrible, and has made me, in some respects, abnormal.  (Meyers 25; underline added)

Edgar Allen Poe's
"The Tell-Tale Heart"
Remote Links;
  Local: "The Cask of Amantillado" (vocabulary and E-Text); "The Purloined Letter"

• Is the narrator male or female?
• In the story, the narrator wants to kill the old man because of his eye.  Why?  Why does he also seem to take great pleasure in his slow entrance into the old man's room?
• In class, we have two interpretations:
• Jenny Chang thinks that the room represents the narrator's unconscious, and the old man's blind eye, a sign of castration by which the narrator is repulsed by.  The narrator fears castration, so he wants to kill the old man who represents his fear or a castrated man.
• Kate Liu thinks that there is a simultaneous attraction and repulsion  because the narrator identifies with the old man as a father/authority figure but also wants to attack the latter.

"The belief in the evil eye dates back to ancient times, and even today, is fairly common in India and the countries
bordering the Mediterranean Sea. References are made to it in Jewish, Islamic, Buddist and Hindu faiths. The belief
centers around the idea that those who possess the evil eye have the power to harm people or their possessions by merely looking at them. Wherever this belief exists, it is common to assign the evil eye as the cause of unexplainable illnesses and misfortunes of any kind.
              To protect oneself from the power of the eye, certain measures can be taken. In Muslim areas, the color blue is
painted on the shutters of the houses, and found on beads worn by both children and animals. There is also a specific
hand gesture named the "Hand of Fatima," named after the daughter of Mohammed. This name is also given to an amulet
in the shape of hand that is worn around the neck for protection. In some locations, certain phrases, such as " as God will" or "God bless it" are uttered to protect the individual from harm. In extreme cases, the eye, whether voluntarily or not, must be destroyed. One Slavic folktale relates the story of the father who blinded himself for fear of harming his own
children with his evil eye. "(From "The Tell-Tale Heart" page in The Poe Decoder)

• Poe's biography;
• Poe's Works
• Poe's Virtual Library
• The House of Usher: Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
• The Poe Decoder; including Qrisse's Poe Pages
• POE PERCEPTIONS: GREAT POE WEBSITES AND LINKS

• Bishop's experience's of loss
1. Her father died when she was eight months old.
2. Her mother then was institutionalized.  She died in a sanatorium in May 1934.
3. Bob seaver committed suicide because she refused to marry him.
4. Kita took an "'accidental' overdose" upon their reunion in Yew York in 1967.

  

Brett Miller's Life and the Memory of It qut in MaCabe 253.
 
• MaCabe's interpretation of "One Art":

"The poem reveals a struggle for mastery that will never be gained.  We can only make loss into therapeutic play.  One does try to master loss, but Bishop recommends that we recognize our powerlessness and play with the condition of loss: the blurring and splitting of presence and absence, being and nonbeing.
    Bishop's "art of losing" resembles what Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Pinciple calls the rule of "fort-da" (gone/there), after a game his grandson constructed in his mother's absence. . . . " (27)
 
• "Sestina" --
To understand and appreciate the poem, we need to understand
1. How Bishop weaves the six key words (child, grandmother, stove, house, almanac, and tears) into the complicated pattern of sestina.
2. How the six elements develop and get different meanings in the poem.
As Ryan puts it very nicely, "[the] form of the poem prescribes a repetition and displacement of its key words that is reflective of the way grief travels from one sign or object to another, moving away from and around the original loss tha cannot be named except as 'it'" (42).  In other words, without naming or explaining the source of sadness, the poem shows how the grandmother and the child respectively deal with their losses by  finding an indirect way to express and transform their sadness.  While Lacan thinks that our desire can never be satisfied and we always need to replace the desired object with something else on a metonymic chain, what Bishop shows here is the cathartic process whereby the original sadness gets cleansed away or transformed.

For instance, tears gets replaced by rain, steam on the tea-kettle, tea, button, moons (the passing of time) till finally it becomes something to plant (bury)out of which something more productive might come.

MaCabe, Susan.  Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss.  Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania UP, 1994.  (Highly recommended)
• MaCabe's approach:
"A psychoanalytic perspective toward loss is invoked through Freud; with Lacan, I am able to link the experience of loss with writing.  I supplement my use of the French postmodern feminists Kristeva and Cixous, who invoke the possibility of a distinctly feminine writing, with a variety of Anglo-American feminists such as Chodorow, Oxtriker, Miller, Gilligan, Butler, Flax, as they diversely approach issues associated with women's writing and feminist philosophy" (xix)
Ryan, Michael.  Literary Theory : A Practical Introduction.  MA: Blackwell, 1999.