Literature and Psychoanalysis
This course examines the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature by focusing on Freud's concept of the "uncanny" as it appears in his famous essay of the same name, and as it emerges in literary examples in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Freud himself drew on the work of E.T.A. Hoffman, whose "Sandman" features mysterious strangers, a mechanical doll, family romance, and madness. In the course of the semester, literary texts may include Hoffman's story, "The Sandman," Dostoevsky's The Double, E.A. Poe's Collected Stories.