Rival authorities: Sigmund Freud, T. S. Eliot and the interpretation of culture.

摘要

The dissertation begins with two chapters that treat Freud neither as the creator of a 'master' interpretive system nor as a latent poet or novelist but as a literary critic who selfconsciously attempted to replace the poet-critic as the authoritative interpreter of literature and culture. I examine Freud's early writings and argue that there is little difference between his clinical and literary-critical insights. Because Freud insisted on treating well-read patients with a method which relied heavily on the shared literary knowledge of doctor and patient, his clinical insights were always garnered from readings of readers.;Chapter 3 traces Eliot's early familiarity with Freud--from short-lived enthusiasm to increasing skepticism and hostility. By examining Eliot's uncollected essays and reviews I document a deep preoccupation with Freud and his growing authority. In early essays, Eliot countered Freud's tendency to polarize the roles of poet and critic by emphasizing the "impersonal" nature of poetry and the irrational aspect of criticism. In his early poetry Eliot emphasizes the poet's anti-Oedipal reticence by portraying himself as the impotent observer of "things that other people have desired." By examining early responses to Eliot's writing which champion Eliot as the poet-critic who resisted Freud, I show that Eliot's response to Freud was crucial to the phenomenon of his early modern centrality.;The dissertation concludes by arguing that The Waste Land is best read against the Freudian background it invokes and resists. Eliot's identification with the all-knowing but undesiring Tiresias should be seen as a refutation of Freud's Oedipal reading. The poem resists psychoanalytic interpretation by depicting the poet as the selfconscious organizer of the poem's symptomatic fragments, particularly in the 'notes' which gesture toward the interpretive systems Eliot espoused and act as a preemptive strike against inevitable Freudian interpretations. The poem's hyperallusivity burlesques psychoanalytic reliance on the telling allusion and (because of the esoterism of many of the allusions) argues for the literary critic rather than the psychoanalyst as The Waste Land's authoritative interpreter. Finally, the poem's indeterminacy enacts Eliot's skepticism about Freudian conceptions of cultural inheritance and analytic interpretation.