Humanities ch. 33

Which of the following is the minimalist poet famous for odd punctuation and refusing to capitalize his name in print?

Cummings

What parts of Europe were most active in the birth of Expressionism in art?

German expressionism and some parts of Russia.

What, according to Freud (Civilization and Its Discontents), are some of civilization's "discontents"?

Human aggression is the main discontent in our civilization. Because of aggression civilizations come and go. There is violence. There is also sexual aggression. The need to escape our problems through intoxication, the need for a better life, displacements of libido all are connected with our human aggression.

Show how the new psychology influenced the birth of key movements in the arts: Expressionism

It was in the visual arts that the new psychology made its most dramatic impact. As artists brought to their work their hidden emotions, their repressed desires, and their dreams and fantasies, art became the vehicle of the subconscious. The irrational and antirational forces of the subconscious were the subject and the inspiration for an assortment of styles, including Expressionism. Expressionism was a style marked by extremes, pathos, violence, and emotional intensity. In the visual arts, it was marked by distorted forms, harsh colors, and the bold and haunting use of black. Composers also wrote in the Expressionist style. Cultural anxiety and apprehension found their way into compositions in the use of atonal and harshly dissonant melodies and harmonies. Song cycles resembled stream-of-consciousness monologues.

Which of the following Irish expatriates popularized the literary interior monologue and stream-of-consciousness writing?

Joyce

Which of the following writers was so paranoid about the ills of society that he directed his lawyers upon his own death to destroy all his works, a request which was fortunately ignored?

Kafka

Which of the following was a virtual shut-in who, from his cork-lined room in France, pursued a life of introspection and literary achievement?

Proust

Explain the basic theories of Freud and Freudian psychoanalysis.

Sigmund Freud was the founder of psychoanalysis,a therapeutic method by which repressed desires are brought tothe conscious level to reveal the sources of emotional disturbance. Its tools were dream analysis and "free association" (the spontaneous verbalization of thoughts).Freud theorized that instinctual drives, especially the libido, or sex drive, governed human behavior. Guilt from the repression of instinctual urges dominates the unconscious life of human beings and manifests itself in emotional illness. He argued that a child formed an unconscious attachment to the parent of the opposite sex and a jealousy towards the parent of the same sex, a phenomenon he called the Oedipus complex.In describing the activities of the human mind, Freud proposed a theoretical model, the terms of which have become basic to psychology. This model pictures the psyche as consisting of three parts: the id, the ego, and the superego. The id, according to Freud, is the seat of human instincts and the source of all physical desires, including nourishment and sexual satisfaction. Freud described the second part of the psyche, the ego, as the administrator of the id: the ego is the "manager" that attempts to adapt the needs of the id to the real world. The third agent, the superego, is the moral monitor commonly called the "conscience." The superego monitors human behavior according to principles inculcated by parents, teachers, and other authority figures.

What images in Kafka's short story The Metamorphosis create a mood of apprehension in the reader?

Some of the images that can be compelled in your mind to create a feel of apprehension is when he speaks of waking up looking like a bug, the itchy spot surrounded by many white spots, and the brown fluid coming from his mouth.

Explain Jungian psychology and how his theories differed from those of Freud.

The Swiss physician Carl Gustav Jung, a colleague of Freud, found Freud's view of the psyche too narrow and overly deterministic. Jung argued that the personal, unconscious life of the individual rested on a deeper and more universal layer of the human psyche, which he called the collective unconscious. According to Jung, the collective unconscious belongs to humankind at large, that is, to the human family. It manifests itself throughout history in the form of dreams, myths, and fairy tales. The archetypes (primal patterns) of that realm reflect the deep psychic needs of humankind as a species. Jung treated the personal psyche as part of the larger human family, and, unlike Freud, he insisted on the positive value of religion in satisfying humankind's deepest psychic desires.

How did each of the parts of Freud's three-part psyche (id, ego, and superego) function, according to Freud?

The id is the drives (like libido). It is unconscious. It is the source of physical desires and the seat of human instincts. A metaphor for the id is the devil on your shoulder. The ego manages the id. It is conscious. The superego is our conscience. It's where our morals lie. It is conscious. A metaphor for the superego is the angel on your shoulder.

Describe with examples the impact of the new psychology on literature: Proust, Kafka, Joyce, and E. E. Cummings.

The impact of the new psychology and Freud's pessimistic view of human nature affected all aspects of artistic expression, not the least of which was literature. A great many figures in early twentieth-century fiction were profoundly influenced by Freud, such as Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, and E. E. Cummings. In the works of these novelists, the most significant events are those that take place in the psychic life of dreams and memory. The narrative line of the story may be interrupted by unexpected leaps of thought, intrusive recollections, self-reflections, and sudden dead ends. Fantasy may alternate freely with rational thought.Proust's Remembrance ofThings Past explored the role of memory in retrieving past experience and in shaping the private life of the individual. Proust's mission was to rediscover a sense of the past by reviving sensory experiences buried deep within his psyche, that is, to bring the unconscious life to the conscious level. "For me," explained Proust, "the novel is . . . psychology in space and time."Kafka brought Freudian subconscious to macabre and disorienting stories. His novels and short stories take on the reality of dreams in which characters are nameless, details are precise but grotesque, and events lack logical consistency. In the nightmarish world of his novels, the central characters become victims of unknown or imprecisely understood forces. His style, which builds on deliberate ambiguity and fearful contradiction, has had a major influence on modern fiction.From Freud's works, Joyce drew inspiration for the interior monologue, a literary device consisting of the private musings of a character in the form of a "stream of consciousness"—a succession of images and ideas connected by free association rather than by logical argument or narrative sequence. The stream-of-consciousness device recalls the technique of free association used by Freud in psychotherapy.Modern poets, such as Cummings, avidly seized upon stream-of-consciousness techniques to emancipate poetry from syntactical and grammatical bonds. Cummings poked fun at modern society by packing his verse with slang, jargon, and sexual innuendo, a literary analogue to Freud's concept of libido.

What is the subject of Cummings' "[she being Brand]"?

The subject matter was the car and all the things that happen during the act of driving the car, told in a metaphoric way.

What experiences trigger the narrator's memory in Swann's Way by Proust?

The taste of tea and of the Madeleine. This took him back to the place and time where he partook of his first sip of tea or crumb of the cookie.

Primal patterns from the realm of the shared layer of human psyche such as myths, dreams, and fairy tales are called

archetypes

Of all his discoveries, Freud considered his research on ________ his most important.

dreams

Edvard Munch's The Scream exemplifies which of the following schools of painting?

expressionism

What is the three part psyche composed of?

id, ego, and superego

A mode of artistic representation in which commonplace objects and events are exaggerated or juxtaposed in unexpected ways to evoke a mood of mystery or fantasy is called

magic realism

Most psychic disorders, according to Freud, were the result of?

sexual trauma suffered as a child

The positive modification and redirection of primal urges is termed

sublimation

Jung's idea of a shared layer of human psyche, a layer all humans are tied to, is called

the collective unconscious