WHO'S YOUR DADDY? Psychoanalysis, Literature, and the Family

3 Credits.

In this course we will read a selection of foundational texts by Sigmund Freud, and pair them with a cluster of literary works--the Oedipus Cycle of Sophocles, William Shakespeare’s tragic drama “Hamlet”, Henry James’s short novel “The Turn of the Screw,” Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Purloined Letter” and Jeremy O. Harris’ “Slave Play”—which have inspired psychoanalytic ideas and multiple critical generations of psychoanalytic literary interpretation. The goal of this course is to acquaint you with the essential components of Freud’s theory, to assess the relationship of that theory to the literary models from which Freud drew inspiration, and to acquaint you with the variety of forms that psychoanalytic literary criticism has taken up to the present. Questions regarding paternity, maternity, sibling rivalry, the couple form and the nature of the family as a historically pervasive yet flexible psychic structure will orient, but not limit, our class discussions. Building out from psychoanalysis, we will conclude with a consideration of the family abolition argument.