Posted by badhaircut on May 10, 2005, at 1:05:12
In Sunday's New York Times Book Review (May 8 2005), Lee Siegel blames Freud for lousing up modern literature by killing off any interest in deep, "psychological" character development.
<snip>
Freud's abstract, impersonal concepts have worn away the specificity of fictional character. [It now makes no] sense to fashion the idiosyncratic, original inner and outer lives of a character in a novel. His or her behavior [is] already accounted for by the universal realities of id, ego, superego, not to mention the forces of repression, displacement and neurosis.
<snip>Siegel says Freud mined the great earlier works of literature for examples to use in his mental treatises, inadvertently destroying the genre.
He says that's why movies are more prestigious than books now: because they're not so dependent on character, which Freud ruined.
I'm not trolling. I think Siegel goes too far in bashing modern characters, and Freud was only part of the 20th century's influences on writers. But you've got to wonder, if he'd gone into neurophysiology like he wanted....
Review is free for the next 5 days at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/08/books/review/08SIEGELL.html-bhc
poster:badhaircut
thread:495873
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/books/20050501/msgs/495873.html