Tag Archives: Literature

Dr Chisomo Kalinga

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Affiliation: University of Edinburgh

Dr Chisomo Kalinga is a Wellcome medical humanities postdoctoral fellow at the Centre of African Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Her work investigates literary traditions and community health narratives in Malawi and its border countries. As part of the project, she collaborated with Chancellor College at the University of Malawi to launch the first medical humanities conference and network for Malawiana studies. She was most recently a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh. Her PhD was completed at King’s College London (2014) and offered a comparative study of Malawian and American AIDS fiction. Her research interests are sexuality, health, wellbeing, traditional healing and witchcraft and their narrative representation in African print and oral literatures.

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Dr Donna Cox

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Affiliation: Open University

Associate Lecturer with the Open University. Research interests are primarily in the area of critical theory and psychoanalytical approaches to textuality and culture with a particular interest in positions of rhetoric inhabited in relation to analysis. Published work has ranged from readings of the early work of Freud, identity and bodily habitation, linguistic negotiation in rap and hip-hop, and the role of phantasy in children’s literature.

Email: d.cox@open.ac.uk

“Even better than the real thing: Fantasy and phantasy in Boys’ Love manga” by Anna Madill

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gender-and-sexuality-in-contemporary-popular-fantasy-beyond-boy-wizards-and-kick-ass-chicks-by-jude-roberts-esther-maccallum-stewart-1317130537Using a Kleinian psychoanalytic framework, Prof. Anna Madill explores the central motif of the ‘doll’ in boys’ love mangas.

The first paragraphs of her book chapter

Boys’ Love (BL) is an umbrella term for a cluster of genres originating in early-1970s Japanese popular culture which portray male-male sexuality largely by and for women. BL incorporates, with variable and often subtle differentiation, yaoi, shonen-ai, and – possibly – female-oriented, male-male shotacon. The characteristic media in which BL appear are manga, anime, illustrated light novels, and computer games. However, BL dojinshi – non-professional, but often highly polished productions – are also sold, traded, and uploaded to the internet. Since the late-1980s BL has gained a worldwide audience and commercially translated products are available, as are fan-translated manga, fan-subbed anime, language-patches for games, and original work in different languages.

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Prof Robert Stolorow

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Affiliation: Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis

Robert D. Stolorow is a Founding Faculty Member at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles, and at the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity, New York. Absorbed for more than four decades in the project of rethinking psychoanalysis as a form of phenomenological inquiry, he is the author of World, Affectivity, Trauma: Heidegger and Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2011) and Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections (Routledge, 2007) and coauthor of eight other books. He received his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Harvard in 1970 and his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of California at Riverside in 2007.

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Psychoanalytic Study of Literature

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Sigmund

An Introduction to Psychoanalytic Study of Literature

by Dianne M. Hunter, Emeritus Professor of English, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA

This independent-study course introduces a theory of literature based on Sigmund Freud’s models of dreaming and daydreaming as analogues for the transformative dynamics of literary responses.

Centered on a psychoanalytic theory of dreaming, this course leads from Sigmund Freud’s model of dream processes into a general theory of mind and psychosexual development. The psychology of unconscious mind theorized by Freud and the theory of ego psychology summarized by Erik Erikson provide the groundwork for analyzing literary transformations of unconscious fantasies toward meanings.  The readings below add up to a theory of literature as a transitional object in transitional space where fantasies can be transformed toward meanings in a way that is analogous to Freud’s idea that dreams are disguised attempts to fulfill unconscious wishes stemming from childhood pleasures and fears.

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