Write a 4 to 5 page paper (not 3 1/2) about the link between the formal choices an author makes—about narrator, point of view, style of narration, or other relevant devices for situating the reader—and the psychological themes investigated by ONE of the texts we have covered (or will cover) in Unit 2.  In other words, how do formal choices reinforce the ideas/themes of the text in question?  And how do these tie in your view to the questions of individual psychology the text addresses, as well as the place of the individual within larger social contexts?

In terms of form, you may wish to consider such issues as narrator reliability, the Gothic form, frame narration, stream-of-consciousness narration, and the literary experimentalism of postmodern or modern literature.  Exemplary papers may build on the issues/questions discussed in Unit 1, including those developed in response to Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontent or “The Uncanny.”  Exemplary papers may also incorporate ideas from Freud’s “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming” or Jung’s “Psychology and Literature” on the connections between literary production and psychology.

Evidence:  Your essay must be substantiated with concrete evidence–QUOTES, plot points, character descriptions, etc.–from the literary texts you are analyzing.  

Citations:  You may use any and all posted notes as source material in your paper and you should cite them.  If you use any additional outside sources, these should be properly cited in-text and your paper should include a works cited page.  No works cited page is necessary if you use only course texts.

Format:   Your paper must be double-spaced and use 12 point Times New Roman font. 

freud civilizations and its discontents (questions from unit 1 pertaining to last attachment)

¡  What, to Freud, decides the purpose of life? [729]

¡  Why does Freud claim that the “programme” of happiness is “at loggerheads with the whole world” and cannot be experienced except as an “episodic phenomenon” (729).

¡  What would your life look like as pure happiness in the way Freud describes?

¡  What does Freud mean by the following?:

¡  “Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks.  In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures […]  There are perhaps three such measures: powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery; substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensitive to it” (728)

¡  What role does Freud attribute to art in the excerpts we read? [732]  To psychosis/madness?