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Literary Theory: Freud And Lacan

Decent Essays

Literary theory is a body of ideas and methods used in interpreting literature. By literary theory we refer to the different theories developed in order to retrieve meanings from literary work. According to Culler “Theory in literary studies is not an account of the nature of literature or methods for its study...It’s a body of thinking and writing whose limits are exceedingly hard to define.” (in Culler, p. 3;as cited Chakraborty, n.d.). There are a few schools of literary theory, but this paper will analyze and discuss the psychoanalytic approach of Freud and Lacan as opposed to the liberal humanist idea of analysis.
To begin with, the psychoanalytic approach is based on psychoanalysis itself and the main critics were Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan who agreed to a certain degree, that a text is fundamentally related with the psyche. Freud strongly believed that our unconscious is affected by events which occurred during childhood and so he divided the human psyche into developmental stages regarding one’s relationship with parents, drives and the pleasure principle. These stages are the oral, anal and the phallic, representing the levels of desire and repression.What he claims is that, what has …show more content…

The Lacanian theory is in support of the postructuralist idea of the division of the self, linking this idea to intertextuality and how textuality is made up of cultural meanings challenging the borders of the text, which become “diagnostic telling us something about the meanings and implications of the text” (Delli, 2017, para. ). This theory binds together the writer with the culture, the text with the reader, at the level of language which is an access to the culture. He considers the text as a process-field and he focuses on the structure of a text, through repetitions, gaps and closures. He focuses not on the text itself, but on the structures of it and how they are realized by the

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