Norman N. Holland
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All my life, I've been fascinated by the way people relate to literature and the arts. As a result, I teach and write about psychoanalytic psychology. cognitive science, and what they tell us about the responses of readers to literary texts, movies, and occasionally the other arts.
In the spring of 2008, I will be teaching an undergraduate honors course, Classic Films. Here is a syllabus for the course.
My latest book Meeting Movies continues this project in a personal way. It combines interpretations of eight classic movies with the associations and memories that explain why I perceive the movies as I do. You can find out more about the book here, and you can order the book directly from Amazon.
Recently, I've gotten intensely interested in what neuropsychology has to say about the literary process. I've put some information online about my current seminar, "The Brain and the Book," the course description and the syllabus.
I've provided here a bibliography of my articles, and I've put some of my recent and old essays, published and unpublished, online for your edification and amusement.
I've also written thirteen books, two of which I've put online. One is my magnum opus: The I, an ambitious book that develops a model of human nature itself. There is also online a Spanish translation of this book, El Yo.
The other is The Critical I, a vigorous critique of the "disappearance of the subject" with such oddments as a reader-response study of reactions to a porn film and seven critical analyses of "Thirty Days Hath September." A "new" book of mine, the much-revised second edition of Poems in Persons can be purchased online from Cybereditions or Barnes and Noble.
The University of Florida Library has also (as part of an experimental project) graciously put some of my books online. Here are the URLs:
The First Modern Comedies (1959)Electronic resource (HTML)The Shakespearean Imagination (1964)
Electronic resource (JPEG)Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare (1966)
Electronic resource (PDF)Electronic resource (JPEG)The Dynamics of Literary Response (1968)
Electronic resource (PDF)Electronic resource (full text)5 Readers Reading (1975)Electronic resource (HTML)Laughing, A Psychology of Humor (1982)Electronic resource (JPEG)The I (1985)
Electronic resource (PDF)Electronic resource (Full text)The Brain of Robert Frost: A Cognitive Approach to Literature (1988):Electronic resource (JPEG)Holland's Guide to Psychoanalytic Psychology and Literature-and-psychology (1990):
Electronic resource (PDF)Electronic resource (JPEG)Shakespeare's Personality (1989). Edited with Bernard J. Paris and Sidney Homan:
Electronic resource (PDF)Electronic resource (JPEG)
Electronic resource (PDF)I began teaching and writing in 1956. Back then, I thought there were fairly fixed ways we respond to literature (the New Critical stance). I decided psychoanalysis was the best way to understand those responses. Testing this hypothesis, though, led to a revelation. Readers re-create texts in their own minds, sometimes very differently from what you might expect. Since then, I've explored, in addition to psychoanalytic psychology, cognitive and brain science to see how all three could combine to create a more telling picture of our relations to literature and, indeed, of human nature.
I've put online an intellectual autobiography, a short version and a longer, more personal version, to explain how I came to hold the ideas I do, or you can just get the ideas without the history.
And, if you like your ideas sugar-coated (who doesn't?), you can read my detective novel, Death in a Delphi Seminar, which explores some of this thinking in the context of a murder in a reader-response seminar.
In years past, I've taught Shakespeare, comedy and theories of comedy, classic and contemporary films, and Freud, at both graduate and undergraduate levels. In recent years I've focused on one two-semester sequence for graduate students (although I regularly admit qualified undergraduates): Psychoanalytic Psychology and Psychoanalytic Criticism. I've also posted online the course memorandum for the first, Psychoanalytic Psychology and the second, as given in Fall 1998 and Spring 1999. This semester (Spring 2008), my seminar turns to classic movies, and is entitled just that.
As for my current non-teaching, I do a lot of work with
IPSA (the Institute for Psychological Study of the Arts).
I moderate PSYART, the online discussion group for the psychology of the arts. This is a quite active list with over 900 subscribers.
I also edit (with Murray Schwartz) PsyArt, a journal that deals with the psychological study of the arts. It is an archived, peer-reviewed journal, free to all Internet users. It began publishing in mid-1997.
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