My dissertation, Beyond the Poetic Principle: Psychoanalysis and the Lyric, intervenes in recent debates over lyric reading practices and proposes psychoanalytic theory as a compelling alternative poetics. For the past century, psychoanalysis has had a home in literary criticism as a hermeneutic for reading the text the way an analyst would read a patient—by recuperating narrative. It follows, then, that most psychoanalytic readings of literature have focused on prose. A turn to lyric poetry opens up new avenues for both disciplines and enlivens the scholarly conversation about how to read a poem, and demonstrates the continued relevance of psychoanalytic criticism. Currently, lyric theory is undergoing a crisis, amid disagreements over whether what threatens the poem is treating it like prose, with an identifiable speaker, or assuming its coherence as a genre. Psychoanalysis, and especially Freud, I claim, helps us think about the rhetorical strategies employed in poetry that operate under the surface, that is to say, unconsciously. Lyric poetry and psychoanalysis share specific concerns: address and the question of who is speaking, the imposition of an event in time and the instability of the present, and the relation between performance and listening. For my project, I have chosen three poets who explore these questions and have proven to be key players for both comparative literature and lyric theory: Emily Dickinson, Charles Baudelaire, and Rainer Maria Rilke. My dissertation challenges certain conventionally held assumptions about each poet—Dickinson’s difficulty, Baudelaire’s perversity, Rilke’s intimacy—in order to examine how each anticipates and undermines a stable and comprehensive reading of their work. Standing at the intersection between debates of methodology and form in both psychoanalytic and lyric theory, my work redirects the aims of both disciplines away from reading as reconstructing narrative. By turning to poetry, psychoanalytic criticism can find a way to abide by its original intention of listening. Lyric theory, meanwhile, can take from psychoanalysis a deeper respect of its own generic indeterminacy and formal peculiarity.
Adler, Natalie Anna,
"Beyond the Poetic Principle: Psychoanalysis and the Lyric"
(2016).
Comparative Literature Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0GM85Q4
