This dissertation seeks to understand why novels of the post-Franco period have engaged with the theme of universality. The project traces the evolution of the terms “universal,” “universalism” and ...“universality” in the twentieth century, and explains the ways in which postmodernist fiction and literary theory have criticized these notions for their tendency to assert master narratives at the expense of marginalized cultures. Although their association with imperial discourses has contaminated universalisms, it is argued that three metafictional novels by authors Bernardo Atxaga, Enrique Vila-Matas, and Javier Cercas attempt to move beyond the particular by affirming the interconnectedness of humans and nonhumans. Drawing on ecological theory and continental philosophy, this project engages a close reading of the primary texts and concludes by proposing new cosmological understandings of selfhood. It is shown that Atxaga, Vila-Matas, and Cercas highlight literature’s capacity to forge new networks of relationship between humans, nature, material objects, and historical influence.
Beloved and bemoaned, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga and Suzanne Collin’s Hunger Games trilogy permeated and persist in our cultural conversations and imaginations. What about these particular ...narratives enthrall and outrage contemporary audiences transcending age, gender, class, and mores, and what does the pandemic reactivity to their teenaged heroines suggest about American society in this moment in time? Thorough analysis of the narrative structure, protagonists, and core conflicts found in the Twilight saga and the Hunger Games trilogy in the context of psychological, historical, and cultural studies scholarship—specifically in relationship to the work of comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell and psychologists C. G. Jung and John Weir Perry—reveals how each narrative functions mythologically. By evoking affect-images, archetypal representations of unconscious energies and information, each narrative leans against the taboos and longings of individual psyches while reflecting the condition and dilemmas of its generative social order’s collective unconscious. From the onset of modernity, affect-images of adolescent girls in Western cultural productions have hosted our preconscious conflicts and disowned anxieties about shifting relational power dynamics—in particular, the changing roles of race, class, sex and gender in defining individual identity and the social order. By functioning mythologically, current heroic affect-images, such as Twilight’s Bella Swan and The Hunger Games’s Katniss Everdeen, reflect core anxieties about modernity’s redefinition of the individual and the female, and illustrate the conflict between biological embodiment and modernity’s release of the individual from pre-determined notions of identity and destiny.
This thesis uses a hermeneutic and heuristic approach to understanding the individuation process in adolescence. Examined through the lens of theorists such as Joseph Campbell, Erik Erikson, Richard ...Frankel, Melanie Klein, and Carl Gustav Jung, the research engages a comparative analysis of the author’s autobiographical experience and the hero’s journey as depicted in the widely popular children’s series, Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling. It discusses the repair of unmet developmental needs and encounters with parental loss, death, and good and evil during adolescence as part of the process of individuation. In doing so it illuminates the therapeutic value of story and image in supporting young people through the challenges faced during threshold period from childhood into adulthood.
Over time, humans belonging to western cultures have undergone a profound restructuring of the psyche resulting in a traumatic sense of separation. Culture Collapse Disorder is a term coined for this ...research based on a disturbing phenomenon in the natural world, Colony Collapse Disorder, where beehives collapse because the bees become separated from the hive and can no longer navigate home. Culture Collapse Disorder refers to how the wounded relationship between culture and nature has affected our modern mindset, contributing to disorientation, despair, and the collective loss of connection to an archetypal sense of "home." As ecopsychopathy and excessive consumerism contribute to the increased devastation of the planet, the underlying trauma we experience from the sense of separation propels us toward denial and dissociation. Effectively, those living in the global consumer-oriented culture experience an ecopsychological complex of exile, unable to return to the greater web of life to which we inherently belong. This dissertation employs a phenomenological-hermeneutical methodology to inquire into how our loss of connection to home correlates with Colony Collapse Disorder. Systems theory provides a frame for how we are intrinsically interconnected with our environment, like bees with the hive. Depth psychology, based in part on the work of C. G. Jung, contributes significantly as our culture faces transition, amplifying how we can reorient ourselves and heal the split that has damaged our worldview so profoundly. While our cultural trajectory may not change, understanding our plight with a mythopoetic eye and consciously facing the descent we are called to make, can help. Through awareness and intention, we can collectively engage in the initiation process and still stay centered as the vestiges of a destructive cultural mindset begin to transform and fall away, leaving room for new consciousness to emerge. This dissertation argues that if we are willing to listen to nature, enter the mystery, and allow ourselves to engage in the work of the soul, outdated dualistic thinking of inner versus outer can be demolished as we gain new understanding of our intrinsic interconnection. Keywords: Jung, depth psychology, ecopsychology, colony collapse disorder, culture in crisis, Cartesian split, consumerism, exile.
This thesis discusses the influence of colorism on black Americans’ spousal selection and marriage as presented in the literary works of Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy West, and Toni Morrison. These ...three twentieth century African American novelists illustrate the psychological, economical, and social consequences of colorism in marriage within their literature. The selected works include Hurston’s “Sweat” (1926), Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937); West’s “An Unimportant Man” (1928), The Living is Easy (1942), The Wedding (1995); and Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) and Song of Solomon (1977). Furthermore, this thesis uses a thematic approach of critical race theory and Jungian theory on marriage and personality development to analyze the corresponding themes of domestic violence and sexual deviance, including infidelity and incestuous rape, as consequences of colorism featured in each author’s work.
This thesis focuses primarily on W. H. Auden’s last book-length poem, The Age of Anxiety, as well as several of Auden’s shorter poems extending throughout the modern, anxiety-ridden age. My second ...chapter argues that Auden blurs the distinctions between mythology and history and asserts that history is truly more subjective than seemingly objective, while my third chapter discusses Auden’s liminality between psychoanalysis and theology. After Auden’s conversion to the Anglican faith in 1939, Auden transitions from a Freudian to a more Jungian discourse, since Jung’s psychoanalyses incorporate theology, while Freud’s theories use psychoanalysis to determine religion’s implausibility. This thesis maintains that Auden presents readers with various antitheses throughout his canon as a way to challenge us to decipher beyond a binate understanding of larger, existential ideas and suggest, instead, that these ideas’ significance reside in liminality rather than in opposition.
Focusing on his painting "The Magic Mirror", this essay examines the Native American sources with which the American artist Jackson Pollock is usually associated and goes beyond them to shamanism in ...the Russian empire. The argument rests on the facts that Pollock's friendship with the artist John Graham grew from a shared enthusiasm for the ideas of Carl Jung; that Graham was an ardent devotee of the occult and was knowledgeable about shamanism in Russian territories; that Pollock had a keen interest in North American shamanism and according to a reliable source they discussed this mutual interest; and that Pollock's attraction to shamanism is most evident in several works executed at the time he was involved with Graham. Together they shared the entrancements of the "primitive", the occult, and the unconscious that largely defined the modernist sensibility of their day. (Quotes from original text)
