EHTP 3615 - Existential Psychology and Literature

Kafka, it is clear, read Freud. What might have happened had Freud read Kafka? What if psychology had inclined from the start-as William James, Otto Rank, and Rollo May had urged-toward literary and intuitive epistemologies and conceptions of the mind as it sketched out its apparent topography? Modernist European writers like Pirandello, Woolf, Kafka, Musil, Beckett, and Broch were native psychological geniuses who understood reflexively that existence and psychology could not be systematized-precisely why they opted for fiction and sometimes essay as their preferred methodologies. “No longer joy in certainty but in uncertainty,” exhorted the forward-looking Nietzsche; “No longer ‘cause and effect’ but the continually creative.” In this course, we shall consider selections from the work of some of these modernist masters and several others as well and, so, open up to the crossroads between literature, awareness, world, and the mind. We will be considering, in effect, a gathering of “existential soundings” and thereby inquiring into that, arguably, that only the literary sensibility can say. 3 credit(s)

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