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A Post-Kleinian Model for Aesthetic Criticism
(abstract)
Meg Harris Williams



The Dramatic Presentation of Inner Turmoil: Shakespeare and John Berryman’s Dream Songs
(abstract)
Jay Peters



At a Loss for Words: Writer’s Block in Benjamin Britten’s Death in Venice
(abstract)
Shersten Johnson





article 080330
A Post-Kleinian Model for Aesthetic Criticism by Meg Harris Williams  

      This paper presents a piece of writing by the Kleinian art critic Adrian Stokes as a model for aesthetic criticism in general. First the limits of psychoanalytic interpretation are considered, with regard to the definition of an ‘art symbol’ made by the philosopher of aesthetics Susanne Langer. The problem formulated by Langer is the irreducibility of the meaning in an artwork. Then Stokes is used as an example of the type of psychoanalytically informed writing that is not reductive but aesthetic and, it is suggested, a species of artwork in its own right. Stokes demonstrates there is room for the critic’s verbal creativity through immersing the ego in the artwork and identifying with the artistic process it embodies. Finally this is related to recent developments in post-Kleinian theory that value the artistic and intuitive features of clinical analytic practice, in particular regarding the transference-countertransference relationship.
 
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keywords: Kleinian interpretation, criticism, aesthetics, art-symbol identification, counter- transference, Wilfred Bion, Susanne Langer, Donald Meltzer, Adrian Stokes
url: http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/journal/2008_williams01.shtml

author info:
Meg Harris Williams meghwilliams@tiscali.co.uk

The Bourne, Redlands Lane, Crondall


Farnham, Surrey GU10 5RF
UK


article 080329
The Dramatic Presentation of Inner Turmoil: Shakespeare and John Berryman’s Dream Songs by Jay Peters  

      This paper examines John Berryman's Dream Songs from a psychoanalytic perspective. The paper formulates a means of discussing three factors that impinge on Henry's construction of himself: the heteroglossic nature of thought one's relationship to power and one's relationship to the metaphysical. Though other major mid-century "confessional" poets (such as Bishop and Lowell) had developed ways of interiorizing the modernist poetics of Eliot, Williams and Pound, the main lens through which the paper examines the interiorizing poetics of the Dream Songs is Shakespeare's tragic period, which Berryman had studied closely his entire career. Berryman found in Shakespeare's tragedies not only a means of dramatizing one's relationship to power and to God, but also the use of dramatic dialogue to represent an individual mind.
 
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keywords: Shakespeare, Berryman, Dream Songs, suicide, fratricide, tyranny, oppression, heteroglossia, religion
url: http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/journal/2008_peters01.shtml

author info:
Jay Peters jaypeters@cox.net

Writing, Literature and Publishing Department


Emerson College
Boston, MA


article 080302
At a Loss for Words: Writer's Block in Britten's Death in Venice by Shersten Johnson  

      Based on Thomas Mann's story about an aging novelist's fateful obsession with an adolescent boy, Benjamin Britten's opera Death in Venice artfully dramatizes Mann's story of repressed sexuality masked as creative inhibition. Aschenbach's introductory monologue, beginning "My mind beats on and no words come,” alludes to the psychosexual roots of his dilemma. The music itself even sounds blocked, as do his words, which not only describe his problem, but also are inhibited syntactically and semantically. In order to discover how music and text blend to portray Aschenbach's writer's block, this article examines the opening monologue using a combination of tools: musical-theoretical and grammatical, to discern how Aschenbach's block "structures" the music and text; psychoanalytical, to uncover the causes of his crippling inhibition; and cognitive-linguistic, to ground the analysis in certain conceptual blends that permeate notions of creativity, sexuality, language, and music in this opera.
 
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keywords: Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, Conceptual Blending, Opera, Benjamin Britten, Thomas Mann, Lawrence Zbikowski, Creativity, Homoeroticism, Der Tod in Venedig
url: http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/journal/2008_johnso01.shtml

author info:
Shersten Johnson srjohnson2@stthomas.edu

Assistant Professor of Music Theory


University of St. Thomas
2115 Summit Avenue BEC 09
Saint Paul, Minnesota 55105 · USA


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