Frigörelse eller sammanbrott : Stephen Dedalus, Martin Birck och psykologin

• The purpose of this book is to confront two novels about young would-be authors with a representative selection of psychological theories about the author. In the process I show that 20th-century idealist psychology, like the Bildungsroman, has its roots in pre-Romanticism and Romanticism, and that determinist psychology, like the Entwicklungsroman, has its roots in positivism. In the first chapter a distinction is made between Bildungsroman, Anti-Bildungsroman, and Entwicklungsroman. A characteristic feature of the first two types is an idealistic portrayal of the characters which empasizes the freedom of the will and the possibility of personal self-enoblement. The Entwicklungsroman, on the other hand, is a fitting term for such novels as describe man as a product of heritage and environment. In chapters two and three I discuss James Joyce’s A Portarit of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Hjalmar Söderberg’s Martin Birck’s Youth (1901) respectively. Joyce’s book is a romantically coloured Anti-Bildungsroman while Söderberg’s is a naturalistic Entwicklungsroman. The fourth chapter contains a survey of modern psychological theories about the author. The theoreticians presented are Lombroso, Dilthey, Freud, Stekel, Rank and Jung. There is a conflict which is common to the two main lines of thought within psychology, on the one hand, and the Bildungsroman and Entwicklungsroman, on the other. This fundamental conflict is a product of the conflict between romanticism and positivism, or, to be more exact, between idealism and determinism. A determinist psychology of the kind elaborated by Freud is compatible with a naturalistic Entwicklungsroman such as Martin Birck’s Youth but incompatible with a romantic Anti-Bildungsroman such as A Portrait. On the other hand, an idealistic psychology of the kind elaborated by Jung is compatible with a novel such as A Portrait but incompatible with a naturalistic Entwicklungsroman. Starting from these theses, I attempt to analyze Joyce’s and Söderberg’s novels according to both Freudian and Jungian psychology in the fifth and last chapter.

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Litteraturvetenskap (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Literary Studies (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Close reading

genre

psychological method

psychology of the artist

Romanticism

Positivism

Naturalism

Bildung

Entwicklung

idealism

determinism

Bildungsroman

Anti-Bildungsroman

Entwicklungsroman.

Comparative literature

Litteraturvetenskap

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

bok (subject category)