English 149-1 - Spring, 2014

Topics in Literature

Topic: Science, Sexuality, Psychoanalysis

Class Information

Instructor: Frederickson, Kathleen
CRN: 42903
Time: TR 1:40-3:00
Location: 207 Wellman

Description

This course will investigate the relationship between psychoanalysis and the sciences, taking sexuality as its case. We will read a series of texts that query what counts as "science" by asking whether psychoanalysis is it, and still others that investigate whether this kind of questioning is the most helpful way to constitute a study of psychoanalysis and the sciences. lWe will also look at when and how psychoanalysis has drawn from other sciences--and vice versa--in order to produce sexuality as an object of knowledge.

One of our ways into these questions will be to ask how (and whether) the psychoanalytic case history differs from the memoir and the detective story, asking how each of the three genres invokes science differently. We will read Freud's Dora case history alongside Allison Bechdel's Are You My Mother? (a memoir that is itself, in part about the relationship between sexuality and psychoanalysis) and Poe's "The Purloined Letter" (a detective story that serves as a central intertext for the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan). In addition, we will read other material from Science and Technology Studies and/including psychoanalysis that have been crucial for the invention of modern sexuality (eg, Lacan, Chertok/Stengers, Miller, Fausto-Sterling, Weinbaum, Mbembe)

Grading

Two papers, final exam, in-class tests, attendance and participation

Texts

Are You My Mother?, Bechdel, Allison
Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria , Freud, Sigmund
Sexuality and the Psychoanalysis of Love, Freud, Sigmund
Sex, or the Unbearable , Berlant/Edelman