WRITTEN REPORT IN THESIS 1

INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACHES TO LITERARY TEXTS

•Literary Studies reveals that the study of literary texts (defined in the broadest possible
sense) has been fundamentally redefined by extensive traffic from other disciplines. —it
indicates that crossing disciplinary boundaries in order to draw on extra-literary-critical insights
and methods has overcome anxieties about maintaining discipline ‘purity’.

•Literary Studies has engaged with certain disciplines more than others, and three of its most
productive encounters – with Philosophy, with History and with Psychoanalysis. However, the
question is how the discipline of Literary Studies has negotiated its encounter with the
disciplines of Philosophy, History and Psychoanalysis?

1.)Literary Studies to Philosophy

Philosophy itself is of course a discipline with a long and complex history, and it is necessary to
specify at the outset which branch of Philosophy has influenced Literary Studies. One reviewer
describes Glas as offering ‘philosophical readings of literary authors and literary analyses of the
heroes of philosophy’ (Alexander Nehamas, quoted on the back cover of Glas, trans. John P.
Leavey and Richard Rand, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).

2.)Literary Studies to History

The first step in assessing the encounter of Literary Studies and History is to acknowledge the
complex disciplinary history of History itself

—John Burrow introduces his ambitious survey The History of Histories (New York: Random
House, 2007) by noting that ‘History . .. has been republican, Christian, constitutionalist,
sociological, Romantic, liberal, Marxist and nationalist. All of these have left residues in
subsequent historical writing; none at the moment dominates it’ (p. xviii). There were attempts
before the 1960s to historicise literary criticism, notably by English Marxists like Christopher
Caudwell and Alick West in the 1930s, who explored how literary texts had been determined by
their socioeconomic contexts, and thus anticipated the more theorised encounters between
Literary Studies and History of recent decades.

In addition, in order to construct ever-more persuasive arguments, literary critics have turned
to the kinds of archival work previously undertaken exclusively by historians.

—What this has meant in the first instance is that a more sophisticated critical/theoretical
vocabulary has developed for describing the relationship between the ‘literary text’ and the
‘historical context’, including questioning whether the opposition between ‘text’ and ‘context’
might itself not be reframed in terms of ‘orders of discourse’.

3.)Literary Studies to Psychoanalysis

The relationship between Literature and Psychoanalysis is complicated in different ways, not
least because one of the founding texts of Psychoanalysis is a work of literature , in the case
of Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex.

—Sigmund Freud referred extensively to literary examples in developing his psychoanalytic

categories and procedures, but perhaps the most famous psychoanalytic reading of a literary
work before the 1960s was Ernest Jones’s study of ‘Oedipus and Hamlet’, which was the first
chapter of his Essays in Applied Psychoanalysis (1923). Jones sees Hamlet as a version of
Oedipus: Hamlet cannot kill Claudius because by having killed his father (Hamlet senior) and
marrying his mother (Gertrude), Claudius stands in the way of his own desire; as a result,
Hamlet’s desire is repressed into the unconscious, causing his crippling incapacity to act.

What about Eurocentric orientation of Psychoanalysis?

—Psychoanalytic literary critics have responded by reframing their analyses of literary texts to
question the universality of Western definitions of mental illness. A good example of this more
historically nuanced mediation of literary and psychoanalytic analysis is Jacqueline Rose’s essay
‘On the “Universality” of Madness: Bessie Head’s A Question of Power’ (Critical Inquiry, 20
(1994), 401–18).

—Likewise, Rose focuses on the South African writer Bessie Head’s autobiographical novel A
Question of Power (1974), and argues that terms like ‘hallucination and paranoia in themselves
overlook a fundamental cultural difference. To put it another way, the boundaries between
reality and hallucination are culturally specific and historically (as well as psychically) mobile’.

INSERT IN PPT

INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACHES TO LITERARY TEXTS (1st slide)

What is Literary Studies? (2nd slide)

How the discipline of Literary Studies has negotiated its encounter with the disciplines of
Philosophy, History and Psychoanalysis? (3rd slide)

•Literary Studies to Philosophy

•Literary Studies to History

•Literary Studies to Psychology

(last slide)