AP Literature and CompositionNovember 3, 2008

Ms. Cares

Agenda:

1. Psychological strategies - Take notes on Freud and Psychoanalytical Criticism.

2. Chopin’s “The Story of the Hour” - Read, annotate, and discuss using Freudian theory.

Homework: Read “The Story of an Hour”

Psychoanalytic Theory

• Based on psychoanalysis, which was largely begun by Sigmund Freud.

• Similar to other critical theories, the psychoanalytic critic is interested in reading beyond the literal meaning of the text.

• Can be used to examine a writer’s, text’s, or character’s motivations, either conscious or unconscious.

• Based on the idea that we have inner motivations that are present and evident despite our attempts to hide or alter them.

Psychoanalytic Theory• It is a literary approach where critics

see the text as if it were a kind of dream. This means that the text represses its real (or latent) content behind obvious (manifest or literal) content.

• The critic analyzes the language and symbolism of a text to reverse the process of the dream work and arrive at the underlying latent thoughts.

Freud’s theories that we may examine in literature:

Oedipus complex:- The term comes from Sophocles’ play.- Notion that boys feel an unconscious rivalry with their fathers for their mothers’ love. Boys, therefore, wish to eliminate their fathers to secure their places with their mothers.

Freud’s theories that we may examine in literature:

Electra complex:- Female version of the Oedipus complex.- Term used to describe a daughter’s unconscious rivalry for her father.- Greek legend of Electra who avenged the death of her father by plotting the death of her mother.

Freud on Tragedy:

“If Oedipus Rex moves an audience no less than it did the contemporary Greek one, the explanation can only be that its effect does not lie in the contrast between destiny and human will, but is to be looked for in the particular nature of the material on which that contrast is exemplified… the oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon his.”

Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour”

We are going to take our time to truly unpack this text (both today and tomorrow).

1. Read the story twice through.

2. Annotate - mark the text:

- What words or phrases stick out?

- What observations do you make?

- How might you use the literary criticisms that we’ve learned so far?