Erotic uncertainty: Towards a poetic psychology of literary creativity.

摘要

This is a study of the of literary creativity as revealed in works of implicit metafiction such as Homer's Odyssey, Dante's The Divine Comedy, Shakespeare's King Lear and Othello, Melville's Moby-Dick, Nabokov's Lolita, and Wallace Stevens' poetry. The thesis focuses on pairs of characters that seem to be directing the plot (e.g., Athena and Odysseus or Iago and Othello) as well as on the relationship between the chaos of the author's creative material and the order of the work (e.g., Stevens' poetry). These divisions in the literary texts are interpreted as reflecting the creative split of the author's consciousness into an authorial persona, responsible for the making of the work, and actual person, providing the material for it. Erotic uncertainty and (self-)irony characterize the creative interaction between the two and, consequently, the interaction between the plot-making characters. Fernando Pessoa's "heteronymic" authorship and Soren Kierkegaard's pseudonymous "Authorship" are discussed as paradigmatic cases of the authorial split. In addition, the latter comparison expounds the interdependence of the writer's aesthetic and ethical concerns throughout the creative process.; The thesis does not close with theoretical conclusions, as the subject matter does not allow for this. However, it draws the contours of a new interdisciplinary field, the POETIC PSYCHOLOGY OF LITERARY CREATIVITY---between psychology and poetics, between the first and the secondary movers of the literary work.