Toward a new perspective in literary criticism: Transgenerational psychoanalysis and anasemic procedures.

摘要

This dissertation---Toward a New Perspective in Literary Criticism: Transgenerational Psychoanalysis and Anasemic Procedures"---is a contribution to literary criticism. It offers a new perspective in psychoanalytical criticism on how characters in literary narratives can be interpreted. By examining key concepts in psychoanalysis, which have been used in the humanities for decades, the present inquiry draws on transgenerational psychology, as elaborated by German and French theorists, and anasemic interpretations generated by M. Torok and N. Abraham's psychoanalytical approach. Based on the assumption that a character's psychic life is determined by factors that cannot be confined to intrapsychic processes alone, the transgenerational perspective looks at traumatic events in a person's genealogy that have not been processed. These events function like gravitational centers and send ripples of motion to the outer edges of the system where distant offspring are taken into the service of what has been left unfinished. With the application of anasemic procedures it is possible to move beyond the manifest content of a text to find echoes of traumatic events not explicitly narrated in it.;The first part of this dissertation provides a theoretical discussion of transgenerationality and its relevance for the study of literature. A concrete application of transgenerational concepts in Sophocles' Antigone exemplifies how this kind of approach can be performed. The second part discusses anasemic procedures and their significance for the study of literary narratives. It examines another example, G. Buchner's "Lenz," and shows how this mode of interpretation can he conducted. The third part focuses on J. Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother and illustrates how both methods can be combined, thereby offering a perspective on the protagonist's psychic functioning different from what a psychoanalytic reading would have generated. The concluding part of this dissertation opens the discussion of transgenerationality once again. By examining Lacan's "Graph of Desire," I will argue that desire, in a psychoanalytical sense of the term as the formative principle of the self-other relationship, might in fact be lodged in the Other's past and include transgenerational mandates.