The Psychological Influence in the Study of Modern Literature

The Psychological Influence in the Study of Modern Literature

Karakaci, Dalila

In order to understand reality, we must have a self-reflection. Heraclitus said, “I have sought for myself.” The search for the self and, most of all, the ideas related to “What is man?” were a current question that troubled all writers of the new course of writing at the beginning of the twentieth century. Most of these writers tried to examine the secrecy of man by enquiring the buried places of the soul. The issues that had to do with the Being, Time, Anxiety, Care and Freedom were treated as important themes that disturbed the New Man part of the New World as a contrast to the Old World. It was an area of reasoning, living, protesting against the pragmatist and positivist mental picture of the twentieth century, against the values of tradition, its assumption, against Realism and Naturalism. The ideas of Freud, Jung and Adler became useful to the understanding and studying of modern literature. The psychoanalytically-oriented criticism offered to read “the work of literature with a lively sense of its latent and ambiguous meaning, as it were, as indeed it is, a being no less alive and contradictory than the man who created it.” The shift of modernism on the content of the literary work permitted to process inside the consciousness of the main characters than to the outside world. The main emphases on the inner self foster new ways of narrative techniques as stream of consciousness and opposition of traditional concepts of story and plot. Psychological criticism permitted to examine characters in a novel, the reader and its creator. This paper will be focused on modernism and the influence of psychological theories in its interpretation.

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2012-05

814