Short Course Description
Freud once said that whenever he believed he had made a discovery, he found out that a poet had been there before him. Lacan too asserted unequivocally, in ?Lituraterre,? that psychoanalysis does not turn to literature to discover what it already knows, but to learn something more about the enigmas that are its concern. Indeed, Lacan?s 23rd seminar examines the poetics of James Joyce so as to practically renew psychoanalysis, offering a new model of the speaking being and a new orientation for the clinic. But what is the relation of psychoanalytic theory to poetics? What do psychoanalysis and poetics have in common as modes of thinking about the textual when it takes literary form? In what ways do psychoanalytic theories and concepts transform our conception of key components of poetics such as the signifier, the literary, the poetic? What distinctions does it help us make between types of literary writing? The course will address these questions via a reading of key texts from the poetic tradition in articulation with relevants texts of metapsychology.
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