LOGISTICS!  your masterpiece is due at 12 noon, April 22, 2005 under the door of my office, AH 4117. You should use no less than 4 and no more than 8 pages (double-spaced typed, carefully proofread, with a dynamic, suggestive title) to complete your task. No cover sheet or folder-cover is necessary and late papers will NOT be accepted. You are welcome to bring it to class with you on Thursday, April 21, so as to avoid having to come to campus on Friday. Recall that I call these essay assignments "Pleasure Curiosity Adventure Challenge" and that you should consult, cite and interweave material from at least two (2) outside published scholarly sources that relate explicitly to the particular thesis your essay unfolds--please DO NOT merely quote from a local newspaper or unedited online radical zine you find through GOOGLE on the Internet. Some good starting places for published scholarly approaches to the materials in this class are the Modern Language Association Bibliography and the ProQuest Research Library, available online through Love Library.  Remember, however, the BEST way to do research is to allow yourself to get lost in the stacks of the library.

1. Psychology 101
What do Herculine Barbin and Dorian Gray teach us about the psychology of obsessive human organisms?

2. The Road to Desire
Contrast Oscar Wilde and Sigmund Freud's views of the psychology of Desire.

3. Biography 101
Compare Pascal Bonafoux's portrait of a young Vincent van Gogh with  Richard Appignanesi's and Oscar Zarate's rendition of Sigmund Freud.  Delve into the critical reception for both works as you contrast their biographical methodologies.

4. Sexy Psyches and the Photograph
Familiarize yourself with what Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes have written about the nature and power of photography. Use your new knowledge of photography to critique and analyze selections from THE ESSENTIAL MAN RAY and the LOVE AND DESIRE Photography albums.

5. Reading Ahead is Good for You!
Explore the interruption of heterosexual longing encountered in any or all of the texts contained in the HERCULINE BARBIN portfolio with that to be found in Carla Trujillo's WHAT NIGHT BRINGS.

6. Cinema Meets Psychoanalysis
Let your curiosity drive you to research the biography of Alfred Hitchcock; are there any surprising and ironic episodes that suggest that Hitchcock was the perfect director to "translate" Freud and Psychoanalysis in SPELLBOUND?

7.Classics Revisited Department
Find and read a copy of Sophocles' Oedipus the King, then reread Freud for Beginners. Examine the way
Zarate and Appignanesi's book rethinks, recasts, and reimagines the nexus of problems presented in Sophocles's
text for a 20th/21st century audience.

8.Mirror Mirror on the Wall
Both Van Gogh and Oscar Wilde were gifted narcissists. Explore both the Greek myth of Narcissus and psychological studies of narcissism in your analysis of how it functioned in the critical imagination of the painter and the novelist--you may want to go to Freud's collected works and see what he said about narcissism and weave this as well into your essay.

9. Design your own Thesis.
Design your own thesis incorporating two or three works we have completed!  Email your paragraph-length proposal to me by NOON, Friday, April 8, 2005.
 

NEW! THREE MORE OPTIONS courtesy HERR M, aka Taylor Mitchell 1.  Oscar Wilde used words to create a portrait of Dorian Gray.  Van Gogh of course used paint to create his own portrait.  Delve into the differences/ similarities of painting a portait with words and creating a portait with paint.  (What I am aiming at here is the use of point of view, the use of brush stroke, composition of novel/painting, and/or the ability to lead a veiwer in one direction or another...for as our favorite Lord said "I never quarrel with actions. My one quarrel is with words." ) 2.  Get up and go get yourself a copy of Freud's dream anaylsis.  Study it, read it, live it and then analyze the dreams you have been do diligently writing in your journal or the dreams of a volunteer. 3.  In Dora we learned that Freud believed many of our 'hysterias' could be traced back to family members and family member relations.  Make a family tree of at least two of our main bastards from different texts whether it be Dora, Jensen's Norbert, Vincent, or Dorian/Cybil and trace in similar fashion as Freud the family influences on our sexy beasts.

hints for tastyessays that kick ass!

We begin with a theft; namely, that the particulars of this preamble borrow ideas from the intellectual imagination of Gore Vidal (and one can easily pilfer ideas from shoddier sources). Vidal, in one of his countless essays (a good one is available online here*)reminds us that the word "essay" yields another word one might not have expected to run across. That word is "attempt." There are other ways to understand what an "essay" is; examine its origins for more variations:

Essay n.; pl. Essays. [F. essai, fr. L. exagium a weighing, weight, balance; ex out + agere to drive, do; cf. examen, exagmen, a means of weighing, a weighing, the tongue of a balance, exigere to drive out, examine, weigh, Gr. 'exa`gion a weight, exagia`zein to examine, 'exa`gein to drive out, export. See Agent, and cf. Exact, Examine, Assay.]

You see, most people think of an essay as a finished product--a dull, lifeless, inert textual body with a static introduction, an "A-B-C" body, and a clear, let's-tie-up-all-the-pieces conclusion. You will not write this kind of essay for our very special Tattooed Psyche Psychological Novel class; instead, you will opt to produce something that is less product and more process. That's right, I am asking with no little nostalgia to return to the origins of the essay. Your only task is to make a sincere attempt to produce a set of ordered reflections, a group of carefully arranged tasty words which respond in some way to the novels, films, short critical treatments and lectures you have worked through and will continue to work through in the coming weeks.

Are you writing for Taylor Mitchell and Bill Nericcio? In a way, of course you are. But in order to do well on this assignment, you must forget about your peculiar, if affable, intellectual guide and mentor. The only people who really count are the readers you write for: the audience for your paper--in short, YOUR READER. Who is he? What is she like? Well, regardless of his or her various genitalic configuration, he and she are a lot like you. When it comes to reading, they are impatient and easily bored. They like specific details; they love direct, succinct quotes woven carefully into the fabric of an essay. If you are going to write about an image, they want to see a reproduction of that image. They hate misspellings and passive verbs. They like tangy language which is fresh and not filled with stupid cliches. Like you, they resent having their time wasted.

Have fun! Illustrate your essays if you are dealing with the visual arts, and write better than you can!