Psychology and Literature

Comparable in importance to Mikhail Bakhtin, Lydia Ginzburg distinguished herself among Soviet literary critics through her investigation of the social and historical elements that relate verbal art to life in a particular culture. Her work speaks directly to those Western critics who may find that deconstructionist and psychoanalytical strategies by themselves are incapable of addressing the full meaning of literature. Here, in her first book to be translated into English, Ginzburg examines the reciprocal relationship between literature and life by exploring the development of the image of personality as both an aesthetic and social phenomenon. Showing that the boundary between traditional literary genres and other kinds of writing is a historically variable one, Ginzburg discusses a wide range of Western texts from the eighteenth century onward--including familiar letters and other historical and social documents, autobiographies such as the Memoires of Saint-Simon, Rousseau's Confessions, and Herzen's My Past and Thoughts, and the novels of Stendhal, Flaubert, Turgenev, and Tolstoi. A major portion of the study is devoted to Tolstoi's contribution to the literary investigation of personality, especially in his epic panorama of Russian life, War and Peace, and in Anna Karenina.

Employing thc theoretical resources provided by cultural critics such as Adorno, Jameson, Althusser, and Foucault, M. Keith Booker examines the treatment of issues of power and domination in modern literature. Discussing texts such as Virginia Woolf's The Waves, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, Thomas Pynchon's V., and Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler, Booker focuses on gender relations as a locus of struggles for power in human relations generally. He also pays special attention to the work of Samuel Beckett, reading the novels Watt and The Lost Ones to explore the issues of power and domination in an Irish cultural context. For all of the texts read, such issues are explored in terms not only of content but of style and form. What is distinctive about many modern texts, Booker claims, is the reflexive way literary meditations on power, authority, and domination turn inward to involve examinations of textuality and reading as images of the kinds of struggles for mastery that inform society at large. Booker suggests that literary knowledge is of a different order than the traditional theoretical knowledge that is equated with power in the West. "Literature has the potential to explore and illuminate objects of inquiry in a mode of dialogue and performance rather than by seeking to dominate them in the traditional mode of science", he writes. "Especially in the difficult and complex texts of modern literature, successful reading requires that readers and texts work together, pointing toward ways the human drive for mastery can be fulfilled through cooperation rather than through demanding the submission of some Other who is being mastered or dominated".

This is the first study in English to examine across the range of Greek literature one of the most crucial terms in Greek ethical and social discourse, aidos. Commonly rendered `shame', `modesty', or `respect', aidos is also notoriously one of the most elusive and difficult Greek words to translate. In this book Dr Cairns discusses the nature and application of aidos and other relevant terms in a number of authors, with particular emphasis on their manifestations in epic, tragedy, and philosophy. He shows that the essence of the concept is to be found in its relationship with Greek values of honour, in which context it can recognize and respond to the honour of both the self and others. It thus involves both self- and other- regarding behaviour, competitive and co-operative values. Despite this crucial relationship with systems of honour, however, the possession of aidos at no stage rules out the sort of commitment to internalized standards or ideals which we might associate with conscience.

This book applies the methods and theories of cognitive psychology to the study of oral traditions. Rubin elaborates on three structural devices that appear in oral traditions: those consisting of meaning, those using imagery, and those in which sound pattern is predominant. Next, the way in which these and other constraints fit together is examined. The processes of transmission and recall are then considered. Three genres are considered as different applications of the principles outlined in the book. For two of these -- counting-out rhymes and ballads -- original studies are reported. For the third -- epic -- new analyses of existing data are reported.

Patrick Colm Hogan argues that, to a remarkable degree, the stories people admire in different cultures follow a limited number of patterns determined by cross-culturally constant ideas about emotion. Hogan draws on world literature; experimental research treating emotion and emotion concepts; and methodological principles from contemporary linguistics and philosophy of science. He concludes with a discussion of the relationship between the narrative, emotion concepts, and the biological and social components of emotion.