it's very likely true of psychologists as they learn their poetry in high
school or college poetry classes if they take any at all.  If they are lucky
they may have taken a poetry course where Jameson was the textbook and his
knowledge of psychology seems limited to a cliffsnotes version of Freud.  i
have raised this issue on poetics by the way and was greeted by a knowing
yawn.

tom bell

----- Original Message -----
From: "Rebecca Seiferle" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, August 23, 2003 1:39 PM
Subject: Re: that psychology stuff (for whoever's still interested)


> Hi Tom,
>
> Well, most of my students, who are not particularly well-read
> in any literature arrive with the assumption that poets are mad,
> "weird," "crazy," "suicidal," and if they can name a writer
> or poet by name, it's usually someone that they feel exemplifies
> this. I know because I always ask them their thoughts on this,
> because, years ago, I learned from them that it wasn't just that
> they had an absence of familiarity with literature, but that they
> also had a prevailing set of assumptions about literature and
> writers that, given their not reading, probably have to be derived
> from the culture, in various ways. So while in terms of reading
> anything at all, they were curiously blank, they were not
> therefore "blank slates." One of the difficulties of teaching
> then is that one has to maneuver through those assumptions to make
> enough of a clearing for some openness to what is actually being
> read. In this particular class which is being offered for the first
> time, and it's an honors course of which there aren't many
> at the college, the focus is entirely upon madness and writers.
> It uses the Jamison book as a textbook and looks not only
> at the particular authors, Woolf, Plath, etc, but their works
> in terms of "madness." This seems to me like the most reductive
> of readings, but it also concerns me because it grants the legitimacy
> of psychological study to what is already a prevailing assumption.
> And the tentativeness of the "might be suggested" with which
> many of the psychological studies conclude is taught definitively.
> And, yes, this is a view much prevalent in the culture, but
> I might wonder if some of the psychologists with these studies
> aren't beginning with that view themselves, bearing the assumptions
> of their culture within themselves, and so finding what
> they expect to find, or at least enough of what they find
> to say "it might be suggested."
>
> Best,
>
> Rebecca
>
> Rebecca Seiferle
> www.thedrunkenboat.com
>
>
>
>
> -------Original Message-------
> From: tom bell <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: 08/23/03 03:24 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: that psychology stuff (for whoever's still interested)
>
> >
> > i suspect you are right, Rebecca, and that is a problem as I see it.
Evenin the twenty-first century (not to speak of the 20th), poets are mad
and
> possibly suicidal? and this idea is not discouraged by most educators and
> the popular media.
>
> tom bell
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Rebecca Seiferle" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Saturday, August 23, 2003 10:57 AM
> Subject: Re: that psychology stuff (for whoever's still interested)
>
>
> > Thanks, Doug, for posting this url. I've read three of the
> > papers and find them most interesting. They do have a different
> > focus, in that rather than defining the particularities of
> > poets, they focus on the affect of reading within any
> > self, which is much more compatible with my own thinking
> > on this. I am still interested in all this. I went to a
> > faculty meeting the other night, and I should say it's
> > a community college in a small Western town, but one
> > of the classes being taught is about madness and writers
> > and the Jamison book, referred to in some of the earlier
> > discussions on this, is being used as a textbook. Which
> > suggests to me, anyway, that may of the "mights" that
> > were suggested by those Pennybacker and other studies
> > are being used as if they were in fact definitive and
> > to teach a view of the madness of writers and poets! So
> > I'm glad to have this other approach.
> >
> > Best,
> >
> > Rebecca
> >
> > Rebecca Seiferle
> > www.thedrunkenboat.com
> >
> > From: Douglas Barbour <[log in to unmask]>
> > Sent: 08/23/03 09:08 AM
> > To: [log in to unmask]
> > Subject: Re: that psychology stuff (for whoever's still interested)
> >
> > >
> > > A psychologist here, Don Kuiken, is working with an English prof,
> DavidMiall (Romantics etc) on reader response, so I don't know if it would
> be
> > useful or not.  Papers can be accessed, however, at:
> >
> > Don Kuiken, PhD
> > Department of Psychology
> >
> > http://web.psych.ualberta.ca/~dkuiken/personal/kuikend.html
> >
> > They might be of interest, or they might be off in another area all
> > together...
> >
> > Doug
> >
> > Douglas Barbour
> > Department of English
> > University of Alberta
> > Edmonton Alberta Canada T6G 2E5
> > (h) [780] 436 3320      (b) [780] 492 0521
> > http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
> >
> > I do not limit myself: I imitate
> > many fancy things such as the dull red
> > cloth of literature, its mumbled griefs
> >
> >                 Lisa Robertson
> > >