Write a short note on Psychoanalytic Criticism
The discoveries of Psycho analysis have turned out to be of great significance to literary criticism. Psycho-analysis insists upon primaeval human emotions. It devotes itself to the buried drama of individual life, a major theme in modern literature. A psychoanalyst regards human personality as a vital and dynamic phenomenon in which the self becomes a kind of battlefield where different instincts and impulses are always raging war against conventions and regulations.
A psychoanalytic critic is confronted with the task of exploring the hidden motives or unconscious urges behind a work of art. There is a common notion that a poem or a picture is a substitute gratification, that a work of art enshrines the unfulfilled desires and repressed instincts of the writer, and that it is a sort of dream fulfilment. If this possibility is granted, it may safely be said that the Freudian approach to literature definitely helps us understand a particular work of art.
It enables us to grasp the dominant outlook of a particular writer to discover why we react as we do to various poems and novels. The psychoanalytical criticism thus aims at the search for realities of the self behind social marks. It breaks the personality of the writer and tries to penetrate straight into the inner motives.
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- Plot construction of 'She Stoops to Conquer'
- English Comedy before Goldsmith
- Sentimental Comedy: Reaction of Goldsmith against it
- Character and role of Miss Neville
- Discuss She Stoops to Conquer as a Sentimental Comedy
- Discuss Goldsmith's View of Sentimental Comedy
- Give an estimate of Goldsmith as a dramatist
- Contribution of Goldsmith as a Dramatist
