Word: freudian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Cornell, wrote Biographer Andrew Field, "Nabokov belonged to the department of Nabokov." Just as well, considering the cheerful contempt for critical orthodoxies that resounds through these lectures. The whole historical and sociological dimension of Dickens' Bleak House, he announces, "is neither interesting nor important." He dismisses Freudian interpretations of The Metamorphosis by saying, "I am interested here in bugs, not in humbugs." As for character study in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, "the worst way to read a book is childishly to mix with the characters in it as if they were living people." Great works...
...writers can evoke this October country more trenchantly than Bradbury. No reader of The Fog Horn can pass a lighthouse without visualizing the sea creature listening in the darkness. Parents who understand The Small Assassin, the anecdote of a homicidal infant, will always wonder about the Freudian undercurrents coursing through the minds of their children...
Abraham, however, conceded that there exist limits to applying individual psychology to groups. "A Freudian psychologist would say that we as a nation suffer from 'missile envy,"' he said...
...fantasies were bushwa now being smiled at and implored to spell out in exquisite detail what it is they have been dreaming of. Who knows but that among them one truly remarkable, earth-rescuing dream may arise that is worth dissecting? Who but a psychiatrist Governor (at least a Freudian Governor) is authorized to say that dreams count for something in the world, that truth may reside in improbables...
...World. But what is an American? The question has provoked writers as diverse as Henry James and Gertrude Stein, and it haunts Joyce Carol Oates throughout this vast seven-generation epic. That is not all that haunts her. Oates' twelfth novel informs the occult with Freudian insights. Boys change into hounds, men into bears; a man, swallowed by a great flood, returns decades later to be recognized only by his 100-year-old wife. One of the Bellefleurs has a habit of leaving her window open so that her lover, a vampire, can fly in. Dwarfs bowl...