War lust and literature: Between polemonological and psychoanalytic criticism

This immense field can be summarized by recognizing that the psychoanalytic critic must address one or more of three minds: the author's, the reader's, or a mind derived from the text. The critic can then address them from any theoretical point of view. The future of psychoanalytic criticism, and indeed of psychoanalysis, lies in integrating the discoveries of brain and cognitive science with those of psychoanalysis. In the present, psychoanalytic critics need to recognize that their function is to delight and enlighten. Hence, no more pathography, no more id-analysis, no more symbol-mongering, no more jargon. Only that way, will psychoanalytic critics keep open psychoanalysis' royal road into the human possibilities offered by great literature.

سنت و استعداد فردی از منظر الیوت و أدونیس دو مفهوم اساسی در بطن خود دارند و آن دو مفهوم عبارت‌اند از ذهن و زبان. ذهن به عنوان فاعل شناسا به تصویرسازی از پدیده های هستی می پردازد و آن ها را در قالب زبان می ریزد. در تفکر ایشان دو مقوله ذهن و زبان تا جایی درهم آمیخته می شوند که هستی به مثابه زبان گرفته می شود. این دو مفهوم پیوند عمیقی با مفهوم زمان در تلقی فلسفی از منظر های دیگر، پیدا می کنند. ما در این مقاله این ارتباط را تحت عنوان سنت مورد بررسی قرارمی دهیم. در قطب دیگر این مفاهیم، استعداد فردی قراردارد که تحت عنوان نقد روان کاوی در تلقی فروید، قابل بررسی می باشد. این مقاله بر آن است تا مفاهیم ذهن، زبان و زمان را در آرای أدونیس و الیوت مورد بررسی و مداقه قراردهد و در پایان، شمای کلی از منظر این دو شاعر عربی و انگلیسی از حیث نگاه شاعرانه به هستی به خواننده ارائه نماید.

Combat Gnosticism: The Ideology of First World War Poetry Criticism James Campbell (bio) The war hastened everything—in politics, in economics, in behavior—but it started nothing. George Dangerfield 1 In The Romantic Ideology, Jerome McGann famously proclaimed that the criticism of literary Romanticism (that of M. H. Abrams in particular) was more concerned with promulgating the worldview of its topic than subjecting it to rigorous critique. For McGann, mainstream Romantic criticism was not criticism at all, but the application of literary/aesthetic criteria to a period of literary history that that period had itself generated: "the scholarship and criticism of Romanticism and its works are dominated by a Romantic Ideology, by an uncritical absorption in Romanticism's own self-representations." 2 I want to borrow McGann's terms, if not his entire methodology, to make some similar inquiries into the criticism of First World War poetry. I see a comparable genealogy operating within this critical discourse: the mainstream criticism of First World War poetry, most conspicuously Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory, has formed itself around a certain set of aesthetic and ethical principles that it garners from its own subject. 3 In other words, the scholarship in question does not so much criticize the poetry which forms its subject as replicate the poetry's ideology. I see this ideology primarily in two forms: an aesthetic criterion of realism and an ethical criterion of a humanism of passivity. Furthermore, these criteria are combined by both the poets and their critics to create an ideology of what I term "combat gnosticism," the belief that combat represents a qualitatively separate order of experience that is difficult if not impossible to communicate to any who have not undergone an identical experience. Such an ideology has served both to limit severely the canon of texts that mainstream First World War criticism has seen as legitimate war writing and has simultaneously promoted war literature's status as a discrete body of work with almost no relation to non-war writing. The critical tradition that I identify as mainstream and dominant is [End Page 203] one that equates the term "war" with the term "combat." As a result, what it legitimates as war literature is produced exclusively by combat experience; the knowledge of combat is a prerequisite for the production of a literary text that adequately deals with war. This is what I mean by combat gnosticism: a construction that gives us war experience as a kind of gnosis, a secret knowledge which only an initiated elite knows. Only men (there is, of course, a tacit gender exclusion operating here) who have actively engaged in combat have access to certain experiences that are productive of, perhaps even constitutive of, an arcane knowledge. Furthermore, mere military status does not signify initiation, but only status as a combatant. It is not the label of "soldier" that is privileged so much as the label of "warrior." The results of such a construction are fairly obvious: the canonization of male war writers who not only have combat experience but represent such experience in their texts. Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Robert Graves become the exemplary figures of the genre. The attitude toward war of any particular writer is less an issue than his first-hand experience; Sassoon's use of his war experience to promote a sort of pacifism and his friend Graves's opposing occasional retention of militarism are seen less as contradictions than contrasting uses of a commodity (war experience) that remains essentially unaltered. 4 To use the language set forth in Eric Leed's No Man's Land, combat is a liminal experience that sets the veteran irrevocably apart from those who have not crossed the ritual threshold of war. 5 It can, indeed has, been seen as the ultimate rite of passage: a definitive coming to manhood for the industrial age, in which boys become men by confronting mechanical horror and discovering their essential masculinity, perhaps even their essential humanity, in a realm from which feminine presence is banished. The primary type of literary text that generates this ideology of combat gnosticism is what I would like to refer to as the...

Using the unpublished archives of Jean Norton Cru, held at the University of Aix-en-Provence, this article provides a new interpretation of Cru's famous book on First World War literature, Témoins, first published in 1929. This work severely criticised a large number of books of soldiers' experiences of combat. Here a new reading of Cru's motives is offered, looking in particular at the author's Protestant background as well as at the links between reading and writing strategies.

Using the unpublished archives of Jean Norton Cru, held at the University of Aix-en-Provence, this article provides a new interpretation of Cru's famous book on First World War literature, Témoins, first published in 1929. This work severely criticised a large number of books of soldiers' experiences of combat. Here a new reading of Cru's motives is offered, looking in particular at the author's Protestant background as well as at the links between reading and writing strategies.

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND AMERICAN FICTION: THE SUBVERSION OF Q.E.D. Claire Kahane and Janice Doane* On board ship to America to deliver a series of lectures, Sigmund Freud turned to his companions and remarked, "We are bringing them the plague."1 Although many Americans probably did and still do agree with Freud's gloomy characterization, Americans accepted psychoanalysis so readily that we might question, as Freud himself did, our understanding of its implications. Certainly psychoanalytic practice has flourished here more so than in any other country, and Freudian concepts have influenced a host of related disciplines, including literary criticism. Today, however, that initial enthusiasm is being tempered, not so much by external resistance to its application, as by a period of what Geoffrey Hartman calls "constitutive doubt,"2 a doubt from within the field that both informs and enriches psychoanalytic practice. There has always been internal discord among psychoanalysts themselves, but criticism now seems specifically aimed at the American practice of psychoanalysis, a criticism calling American revisions and interpretations of the Freudian model into question. For the literary critic, moreover, this criticism, proffered in the name of the most profound insights of psychoanalysis, puts into question the security of an interpretive position. If not exactly a "plague," psychoanalysis has proven lately to be a troubling venture, not least of all to we who would practice it. Even this essay is plagued by the fact that psychoanalytic criticism does not constitute a coherent field of theory or practice but is fragmented by different voices. Nonetheless, these difficulties are also proving to be a source of attraction. "In recent years," as Hartman remarks, "psychoanalytically oriented criticism has become increasingly difficult to do. Yet more and more people are doing it" (p. 345). 'Claire Kahane is an Associate Professor of English and a member of the Center for the Psychological Study of the Arts at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She has published articles on Gothic fiction and feminine identity, the comic-grotesque, Virginia Woolf, and Flannery O'Connor. She is currently completing a book on Flannery O'Connor. Janice Doane, a part-time instructor at Canisius College and at Buffalo State College, has published articles on D. W. Winnicott and Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism and has recently completed a book on Gertrude Stein's early work. 138Claire Kahane and Janice Doane From its inception, psychoanalysis has sought to uncover what it had already discovered: the primary significance of the unconscious in human expression. That fundamental proposition still remains the common denominator in the proliferation of psychoanalytic criticism. Assuming a structure of duplicity in discourse, psychoanalytic critics have sought to discern gaps, inconsistencies, and contradictions which signal the operation of unconscious motives. The more ambiguous and problematic a text appears, the more tempted are psychoanalytic critics to engage and master it by applying the laws of psychoanalytic detection. These laws, however, have not presented so much a methodology as an "orientation," or as L. Tennenhouse has put it, a "perspective or mode,"3 that is, a set of assumptions, a place from which the critic approached the text. Initially one's place and direction were fairly certain. The "psychoanalytically oriented" critic placed himself outside the text and gazed downward, penetrating beneath the words, images, and narrative events to reveal the depths of unconscious fantasy, the latent—and real—meaning. The interpretive project was to bridge the gap between figurai notation and latent meaning, to reestablish the continuity of a repressed prior reality and its manifestation in present language. Paradoxically, that required keeping the categories of fiction (the manifest) and truth (the latent) distinct, and moving or translating from one realm to the other. If truth lay in the silence of the unconscious , that unconscious was not assumed to be problematic but rather eminently readable, for Freud's own transparent texts provided critics with the master keys. As an object of this kind of classic Freudian enterprise, American fiction seemed particularly well-suited. From Charles Brockdon Brown to Melville, Poe, and Hawthorne, from Faulkner and Djuna Barnes to John Hawkes and Flannery O'Connor, our most provocative novelists have probed the contradictions of experience and desire, creating a...

Reviewed by: Wittgenstein and Critical Theory C. W. Spinks Wittgenstein and Critical Theory, by Susan Brill; xi & 169pp. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1995, $40.00 cloth, $14.95 paper. Susan Brill’s central claim for this book is that “by relying upon Wittgensteinian philosophy, literary critics will be enabled to escape the stultifying position of absolutist critical discourses without being bereft of any satisfactory means of evaluating . . .” (p. 2). It is a claim well chosen and she gives a well executed overview of the connections between Wittgensteinian philosophy and the study of literature. Her first chapter is a lucid introduction to Wittgenstein’s heuristic, giving ample quotations and insightful guidance for even the philosophical novice. However, her chosen audience is literary critics and theorists, and she uses the Wittgensteinian corrective of descriptive investigation as a counterpoint to both traditionalist and postmodernist critical theories. Her pragmatic goal, in Wittgensteinian fashion, is to “look” at literature, [End Page 401] not “think” about it in terms of preconceiving “theory.” Those familiar with Wittgenstein will find the application of his work to literary criticism illuminating, and those unfamiliar with his philosophical methodology and ideas will get an introductory account useful for literary and critical applications. After the introductory chapter, Brill turns to specific critical approaches and some particularly Wittgensteinian twists to literature, literary theory, and criticism. First, she looks at psychoanalytic criticism which she links somewhat oddly, I think, with semiotic critical orientations—probably to offset the Gallic influence which has fascinated American literary criticism for most of the second half of the twentieth century. Then in a series of three chapters, she turns to what she calls “issues of inclusivity and exclusivity” to look at feminist theories and their literary analyses, at the problems of canonical literature and marginalized writers, and at the “deconstructive project” as compared to Wittgenstein’s descriptive one. Although these three chapters are focused on specific literary ideologies, she consistently looks for the elements of connectivity in her approach to them. Her last chapter suggests some future uses of Wittgenstein in literary theory with particular attention to New Historicism and cultural criticism. The book does have two awkward emphases arising, I think, from the particular methodology of Wittgenstein and from the fact that this is Brill’s first book. First, the Wittgensteinian concept of “game” sometimes is used so broadly by both Wittgenstein and Brill, that everything becomes a “game” and anything can be a piece, a move, a strategy, or a rule. Brill tries to tie this specifically to patterns of discourse and uses it to open up responses to literature, but what is needed is a developed definition of play particularly as it relates to aesthetic behaviors like literature. “Game” is certainly a usable structural device, but without some relationship to the goals and needs of human behavior, it tells us more about the device than the user of the device. Second, the book does tend to take critics at their own estimation, and one needs to remember descriptively that critics are a Victorian invention like corsets and morning coats and just as restrictive in design. Any folk engaged in professional discourse, particularly one engaged in its own legitimization, will tend to over-valuate their own professional worth, and one should not take them too seriously unless it is clear that their profession is doing significant damage. Of course, that question about the damaging effects of critics and philosophers motivates both Wittgenstein and Brill, and the joining of the two here will probably do good for both professions. Certainly the study will do much to bring a more open notion of theory to the study of literature. Susan Brill is a persistent scholar who has drawn together a wide net, and though her chosen task was to suggest Wittgensteinian strategies for reading literature and to caution literary critics about overinvested theories, her own literary and philosophical desire has been to be as inclusive and open as possible to the [End Page 402] dynamics of texts without losing her own value center. Scholarship would surely be a better enterprise if more did what she has done with the persistence she has shown. C. W. Spinks Trinity University Copyright...

The psychological approach to literary criticism has been mainly influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung, and is referred to as psychoanalytical criticism and Jungian literary criticism respectively. This article introduces psychosynthesis psychology as an additional theoretical approach for literary analysis. Psychosynthesis, a transpersonal psychology and therapeutic approach, offers a model of the human personality that includes multiple levels of consciousness. Two of its fundamental concepts are that of a Higher Self, with which each individual is in relationship, and ‘right relations’, which refers to the use of all aspects of will and the deepest awareness possible to relate to all that is present. Through the example of the author’s translation of the poem “Il poeta” (“The Poet”) by Giosuè Carducci, this article explores how the fundamental psychosynthesis concepts of the transpersonal consciousness, the Self and right relations can provide an independent methodology for literary criticism. Since these concepts are not considered viable for psychoanalytical criticism or relevant to Jungian literary criticism, psychosynthesis literary criticism can provide a more inclusive and enriching analysis, especially of poetry. An analysis of Carducci’s poem from the Jungian perspective of the blacksmith archetype is also presented. This article demonstrates how the framework of psychosynthesis psychology is a viable methodology for literary criticism.

What does it mean to live under occupation? How does it shape the culture and identities of European nations? How does it affect the way we write and read literature? These are fundamental questions that set the stage for an in-depth exploration. Focusing on the literary works of writers from various European countries that were occupied by Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union or the Allies during and after World War II, the contributions in this edited volume seek to unravel the complex interplay between historical circumstances and literary expression. Centred on the concept of occupation literature as a genre in its own right, differentiating it from 'war literature', the book navigates this subtle distinction, drawing connections with the Holocaust novel and extending the timeframe beyond Nazi occupation. European Literatures of Military Occupation argues that the multifaceted experiences of occupation have played a pivotal role in shaping European identities. Moreover, the volume links European identities to the experience of occupation by unveiling the complex and diverse ways in which writers respond to historical and political circumstances. Introducing the concept of 'affective realism' and exploring its intersection with the occupation novel, the book provides nuanced insights into the intricate relationship between history, identity, and literature. It combines theoretical perspectives relevant to researchers in the humanities with detailed case studies, generating a truly interdisciplinary perspective, enriched by a strong transnational dimension, creating a cohesive narrative that intervenes innovatively in the fields of literary, cultural, and historical criticism.

Psychoanalytic literary criticism has been, and one presumes will continue to be, under constant attack from literary critics. The main objection has always been that it reduces the work to a narrow set of configurations which do not do justice to the complexity of the text. The ambiguities of the text are said to go far beyond such a crude schematization. At best it was grudgingly admitted that a psychoanalytic interpretation might be allowed to stand as one possible interpretation among many. But this kind of concession is far from acceptable to the new movement and it is not hard to see why. The new movement is not especially interested in the elucidation of individual works, except inasmuch as they can help to validate its findings: that literature, far from presenting a unified consciousness, shows up the divisions of the self. Literary critics, on the other hand, are committed to the concept of ambiguity as product of an omniscient authorial consciousness, which undermines any notion of a work without a stable center. The old psychoanalytic criticism is really on the orthodox side, for it trades on an omniscient authorial unconscious, which smuggled in whispered meanings (I refer to the title of a recent book by one of its pioneers, Simon Lesser [1977]). This approach could be vastly entertaining and very subtle-witness D.H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature but too often it was boringly clear. Sometimes, however, one is assailed by a regressive longing for examples of its boring clarity. In the end most of us would rather be mystified by the work than by the explanation. Reading a text is no longer considered an innocent activitry. Post-structuralist criticism undermines the notion that the text contains a stable meaning. The author's intention is not only not recoverable but was never where he might have thought it was in the first place. The critic can at best transform the text so as to realize his experience of the author's experience, the author himself being engaged in an act of interpretation. It is a matter of sorting out what Paul De Man calls Blindness and Insight (1971), that

This chapter surveys the context of the 1940s, examining the contrasting phases of the war years, the emergence of a ‘postwar’ sensibility, the ‘age of austerity’, and the political and imaginative reconstruction of the nation in the aftermath of conflict. It examines trends in the production of fiction and poetry, and considers the transformation of theatrical infrastructures. It surveys the state of criticism surrounding the literature of the Second World War and the 1940s, and debates the value of modernism as an interpretative category for the period. The chapter also introduces significant thematic preoccupations – such as, the difficulties of writing about war, the impact of conflict on constructions of gender and sexuality, homosocial bonding, the experience of combat, national identity, childhood, memory, violence – and notes the emergence of new discourses surrounding citizenship, empire and modernity. The chapter concludes by evoking Elizabeth Bowen to suggest that the decade is best understood as an age of ‘lucid abnormality’.

The disciplinary and analytic models of shell shock treatment at Queen Square and Maghull give some indication of how soldiers encountered military medicine and hospitals during the Great War. In this and the following chapter, by exploring both soldiers'and doctors'perspectives on treatment in practice, a more detailed picture emerges of how institutions and individuals were involved in making shell shock; of how the condition emerged in the interaction between doctor and patient, in the implementation of institutional rules and treatment techniques, in the antagonistic friction between doctor, patient and military authority. One instance of the way traumatic neurosis was marked by social interaction is in its definition and treatment according to rank. Within the Army, and therefore within the Army Medical Service, rank decisively influenced the opportunities and rights of the individual soldier. In combat rank shaped life-chances, in social encounter rank defined peer group reaction and self-perception, and in sickness too, rank fashioned attitude and expectation, which then guided the formation and presentation of symptoms as well as sanctioning the type and extent of treatment. The collective, popular memory of shell shock treatment is also influenced by rank. United by upbringing, education and social status, officers have been better able to describe their experiences of combat, and these accounts are more widely known in both the medical literature and memoirs of the Great War.

One can imagine the history of psychoanalytic literary criticism (like psychoanalysis itself) as three phases, each enlarging and including the previous one: a classical phase that studied the oedipal conflicts of literary figures; an ego psychology that addressed literary structures; now, a psychology of the self that uses associations to unfold and deepen one's relations to literature. Psychoanalytic criticism used to be disdained in literary circles, but has become highly fashionable, for today other kinds of criticism also use associations. They do not acknowledge the critic's self or countertransference, however, and their psychoanalysis is not the clinician's.

Reed has discussed and summarized the methodological problems of the psychoanalytic literary criticism in detail. She reminds us of the “important tradition in literary criticism which considers the text itself paramount” and which had led psychoanalytically informed literary critics to concentrate on the text, taking into the account psychoanalytic knowledge. Toward the end of Cabaret, a scene provides a point of the contact for the interrelated themes that have been considered so far: cultural and social history, individual history, form and content of the texts, novel and film. Freud postulated four major calamities (real or fantasied) as the sources of traumatic situations: object loss, loss of love of the object, genital loss or injury, and superego condemnation. Brenner suggests that there are major affective responses to the situations: anxiety (something terrible may happen) or depression (something terrible has already happened).

In the early seventies, American feminist literary criticism had little patience for psychoanalytic interpretation, dismissing it along with other forms of what Mary Ellmann called phallic criticism.' Not that psychoanalytic literary criticism was a specific target of feminist critics, but Freud and his science were viewed by feminism in general as prime perpetrators of patriarchy. If we take Kate Millett's Sexual Politics2 as the first book of modern feminist criticism, let us remark that she devotes ample space and energy to attacking Freud, not of course as the forerunner of any school of literary criticism, but as a master discourse of our, which is to say masculinist, culture. But, although Freud may generally have been a target for feminism, feminist literary critics of the early seventies expended more of their energy in the attack on New Criticism. The era was, after all, hardly a heyday for American psychoanalytic criticism; formalist modes of reading enjoyed a hegemony in the literary academy in contrast with which psychoanalytic interpretation was a rather weak arm of patriarchy. Since then, there have been two changes in this picture. In the last decade, psychoanalytic criticism has grown in prestige and influence, and a phenomenon we can call psychoanalytic feminist criticism has arisen.3