Teaching Workshop: Literature and Psychoanalysis

The aim of the teaching is to present an interpretation of the unconscious dimension of which each text is the bearer in the crossover between psychic operations and rhetorical strategies. To this end, the main concepts of psychoanalysis will be introduced in relation to the creative processes at play in poetic and literary writing subverting all denotation (unconscious; representation; Nachträglichkeit usually translated as Deferred Action or Afterwardness; the role of temporality in creative processes linked to language; repression; denial; death-drives and the "work of the Negative"; eros; humour and witticism). What poetry aims for is to create new meaning, that is why the reader acquires an active role within a pre-conscious, largely unconscious communication, usually overshadowed by the medial and intermedial scene, which has to be considered in its strategies of concealment. The teaching is fully consistent with the objectives of the course, whose major endeavours consist in ensuring the acquisition of knowledge in the field of textual analysis and ethics of literature which always entail a working-through of Otherness as well as the unveiling of policy discourses aimed at annexing the diversity they claim to recognise. The teaching anchors the aforementioned goals to a strengthening of the critical humanistic education of the students.
Constant dialogue with students as well as interaction between them will be encouraged in every way. If the composition of the workshop does allow it, it could also be envisaged to form working groups with personal proposals based on the achieved results.

At the end of the teaching the student should possess an adequate amount of knowledge and skills.
Knowledge:
— Acquire the technical vocabulary necessary to identify the sub- and pre-conscious textual strategies aimed at directing the reader's attention to key themes that emerge through oddities, repetitions, apparently superfluous descriptions, diversions etc.
— Learn the evolution of certain forms of psychoanalytic language in relation to literature throughout the history of psychoanalysis, including the current dialogue with neurosciences.
— Develop a purely subjective and personal sensitivity as a probe to delve into the unconscious of the text to be combined with the instruments that are already part of the student's wealth of knowledge and skills.
Skills:
— Being able to identify and focus on the different textual strategies - rhetorical, stylistic, syntactic-morphological, rhythmic components - that underlie the deep isotopy and the less self-evident and self-revealing instances of a literary text.
— Knowing how to integrate these textual indicators of an emotional, representational and affective level, ignored or neglected, with the author's conscious textual strategies and with one's own reader's encyclopaedia, so far considered as the "best strategy" for reading a work.