Affect, Creativity, and the Writing Self (Inventions of the Self)

Catalog description

This course asks concentric questions about the relationship between emotion and self-writing: How do emotions enter the domains of consciousness and language? How does a stable selfhood emerge from the flux of emotional life, consciousness and memory? How do writers experiment with the concept of the self? Our objective is to examine the logic of experimental 'auto-fiction' as a function of the biological and psychological mechanisms underpinning our sense of self. Rather than turning to existing cognitive or psychoanalytic literary criticism, in this course we discuss primary texts on the neuroscience of emotion and contemporary psychoanalysis alongside literary works, enabling you to envisage your own interdisciplinary approach.