LFU:online

This course provides students with an in-depth exposure to the role of the mother in major texts in psychoanalysis and culture. Its focus on close textual analysis is designed to make students more attentive and more critical to their own presuppositions about the operations involved in reading and interpretation.  By examining psychoanalytic theory from the perspective of philosophy and literary theory, students will gain a deeper and more nuanced access to the works in question.

In this course, we shall explore how the figure of the mother often challenges the notion of a natural or stable origin instead of grounding it.  Throughout the course, we will interrogate a number of foundational texts in psychoanalysis and in literature and culture in which the figure of the mother is depicted as non-human and her capacity to reproduce becomes associated with reproductive technologies that mimic the maternal function.  In our discussions of psychoanalysis, we will show how the psychic representation of the mother and the meaning of birth become associated with some of psychoanalysis’s most unruly concepts including: the uncanny, anxiety, the primal scene, telepathy, and magical thinking.  Throughout the course, we how examine how depictions of an uncanny, prosthetic maternal function open up questions about our unthinkable relation to our own birth.  More generally, we will also pay close attention to the ways in which female sexuality both founds the very concept of the human and is excluded from it

Textual analysis from a philosophical and literary perspective. 

Oral presentations and Final paper 

 Readings from Hesiod, Freud, and The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Psychoanalysis, Photography, Deconstruction)

Good command of English.