 2014 - 2015 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| 0680-5141-01 | Psychoanalysis From Shakespeare to Hollywood | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| FACULTY OF HUMANITIES | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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University credit hours: 4.0
Course description
Course description: In a founding book of this field of research J. V. Cunningham argues that tragedy is defined by the kind of action that it presents and that the tragic affect comes as a direct result of these actions despite the fact that affect is also dependent on reasoning. Cunningham is convinced that the affect is of woe, sorrow and wonder. This assertion institutes a crude aesthetics but this is the aesthetics that Aristotle institutes in the Poetics and it is Shakespeare's aesthetics. This is also a true aesthetics. The seminar will begin from this classical understanding of the aesthetics of the Shakespearian tragedy and will embrace the classical definition of comedy and show that it is relevant to Shakespearian comedy. Yet, we will use modern concepts to verify if tragedy is found only in the affect that action has on the viewer? We will see that the characters contain pain, sorrow and wonder that guide their actions in the world and psychoanalysis and philosophy will define such feelings as tragic. King Lear's inability to express love and to internalize words of love leads the play to a tragic end that comprises muteness and violence. Othello doubts himself and his wife's loyalty and his doubt produces a tragic world. Cartesian philosophy, like psychoanalysis will show that it is possible to be cured from doubts and to believe that "I think therefore I am." In relation to comedy we will ask questions about identity because for this genre the search for one's identity is identical to the search for happiness. Shakespeare uses everyday language that teaches the characters to be happy. We will watch films from the Hollywood melodrama that uses the structure of Shakespeare's tragedy to present characters—mostly women—that acquire authority through hatred and the need to defy attempts of a husband, a mother or a daughter to undo their individuality, doubt their own biography. We will watch Hollywood films that use the structure of Shakespeare's comedy to create worlds in which the search for happiness takes the form of a voyage to places such as the bewitched forest of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example, in order to find peace of mind, away from the city, and fall in love, for the second time. We will watch adaptations of Shakespearian plays to film. We will read novellas from the nineteenth century in which the melodramatic aspect borrows from classical tragedy. We will also read texts from the twentieth century in which tragedy appears as personal, not stately. We will analyze paintings that represent the body in ways that promises happiness to the viewer. We will read psychoanalytical texts by Freud, Lacan, Klein, Winnicott, and Mitchell and we will interpret articles of Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze.