Norman Norwood Holland

The Dynamics of Literary Response

Literature and the brain

As psychoanalysis becomes more and more important to literary studies and the accompanying literature bulks larger and larger, students often feel overwhelmed, not knowing where to turn for readings that will open up the subject. Holland's Guide to Psychoanalytic Psychology and Literature-and-Psychology offers an ingenious solution to this problem. It provides concise outlines of all types of psychoanalytic theory and shows how they apply to literary criticism. The outlines point in turn to further, more specific readings--articles, essays, and books--which can then be located by two extensive bibliographies that follow the discussion. These offer materials that range from the earliest Freud to the latest cognitive science and include dozens of bibliographic aids. Holland integrates these suggested readings with lively, detailed comments on various psychologies as they relate to literature. He is thus able to guide students easily to the precise subject they wish to study, be it Jungian criticism, ego psychology, feminist psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic film theory, or interpretation of some specific text. Holland also offers a bracing discussion of reader-response criticism and a lucid guide to the work of Jacques Lacan. A trenchant epilogue defends the psychological approach, suggesting which points in psychoanalytic theory will work for literary critics, and which will not. The only such guidebook for students of psychoanalytic literary theory and literary criticism, Holland's Guide will also prove an invaluable aid for those studying psychoanalysis and psychology.

Holland's Guide to Psychoanalytic Psychology and Literature-and-psychology

Asserting that literary theory needs a dose of common sense, this treatise attacks Saussurean linguistics as outmoded and discredited in its elimination of its subjects. It claims that postmodernist ideas of the individual rest on false linguistic and psychological premises.

The Critical I

5 Readers Reading

After The Dynamics of Literary Response Norman Holland turns toward reader-response criticism and the controversial question of individual reader's varying responses to works of literature. In this informal and accessible book, Holland gauges student responses to poems by H.D., Swift, Keats, and Frank O'Hara. He reveals that each reader recreates the poems in accordance with his or her own central myth.

An Introduction to the Psychoanalysis of Literature

Poems in Persons

Sidney Homan

Bernard J. Paris

00 What sort of person was William Shakespeare? Although we know few of the facts of his life, modern psychological techniques enable us to glimpse the man behind the works. The essays in this volume explore the conflicts he dealt with, the defenses he used, and the way writing, acting, and directing served him psychologically. What sort of person was William Shakespeare? Although we know few of the facts of his life, modern psychological techniques enable us to glimpse the man behind the works. The essays in this volume explore the conflicts he dealt with, the defenses he used, and the way writing, acting, and directing served him psychologically.

Shakespeare's Personality

In his newest book, Norman Holland brings brain science to literary criticism. The Brain of Robert Frost combines psychoanalysis with the revolutionary new findings of brain research and cognitive psychology to model the way we create and respond to literature. Holland draws three central ideas from "the mind's new science": the critical "supercharged" period in infancy when individuality is formed; the binding of emotion to intellect deep in the old brain; the top-down, inside-out, feedback processing of language in the new. Then, using Robert Frost as an example both of a writer and a reader, and comparing Frost's reading of a poem to readings by six professors of literature, Holland builds a new, powerful way of thinking about literary criticism and teaching. - Back cover.

A Cognitive Approach to Literature

The Brain of Robert Frost

Realism and Unrealism

Kafka's "Metamorphosis"

"Casablanca, for example, provides millions with a sense of satisfaction. Why? How did this movie about World War II satisfy an adolescent boy afraid of "not being a man," but too young to be in the military? How did such an outrageously sentimental film enable Holland (and many others) to deal with the scary state of the world in 1942 and, indeed, ever since?" "Meeting Movies poses such questions again and again. As a professor of literature and film, Holland feels compelled to interpret. Yet, beneath and beyond his intellectualizing, a variety of half-conscious personal considerations and recurring themes color his feelings and hence his interpretations. And this, he claims, is true for all of us."--BOOK JACKET.

Meeting Movies

Surveys the various psychological theories which attempt to explain the nature of laughter, and explores the relationship between humor and a person's sense of identity

Norman Norwood Holland

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