Notes from the House of Sleep: Reading the Hieroglyphs of Night-Language in Anais Nin, H.D., and Anna Kavan
| Thesis title in Czech: | Poznámky z Domu spánku: Hieroglyfy nočního jazyka u Anais Nin, H.D. a Anny Kavan |
|---|---|
| Thesis title in English: | Notes from the House of Sleep: Reading the Hieroglyphs of Night-Language in Anais Nin, H.D., and Anna Kavan |
| Key words: | modernismus|feminismus|psychoanalýza|angloamerická literatura|ženské psaní |
| English key words: | modernism|feminism|psychoanalysis|Anglo-American Literature|women's writing |
| Academic year of topic announcement: | 2022/2023 |
| Thesis type: | diploma thesis |
| Thesis language: | angličtina |
| Department: | Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (21-UALK) |
| Supervisor: | Mgr. David Vichnar, Ph.D. |
| Author: | hidden - assigned and confirmed by the Study Dept. |
| Date of registration: | 23.03.2023 |
| Date of assignment: | 23.03.2023 |
| Administrator's approval: | approved |
| Confirmed by Study dept. on: | 30.03.2023 |
| Date and time of defence: | 06.09.2023 00:00 |
| Date of electronic submission: | 09.08.2023 |
| Date of proceeded defence: | 06.09.2023 |
| Submitted/finalized: | committed by student and finalized |
| Opponents: | doc. Erik Sherman Roraback, D.Phil. |
| Guidelines |
| This thesis aims to explore the works of three writers and their relations to their nighttime dreams as well as daydreaming and how the combination of their sessions with their psychoanalysts, their parental traumas, and their close approach to their dreams affect their creativity in developing their writing.
The first writer to be dealt with is Hilda Doolittle or H.D.. The main point of examining H.D.’s work Tribute to Freud will be her close account of the sessions she had with Sigmund Freud, the psychoanalyst’s approach to H.D.’s creative side as well as her dreams and “visions”, and the clash between her womanhood and Freud’s ideas on the female inferiority complex and on her relationship with her mother. His interpretation of her writer’s block, the nature of inspiration, and her struggle with artistic creativity along with his uneasy paternal role vis-à-vis H.D. will be dealt with in detail. The second writer to be mentioned will be Anais Nin. Her work, House of Incest in which she collects her dreams. Mainly her nightmares will be taken as the main source of discussing her dreams and her relation to the importance of symbols as catalysts of creativity. Her relationship with Otto Rank will be detailed as the main influence on her conception of the importance of psychoanalysis, the unconscious, free association, the resemblance between a writer and a psychoanalyst and the resolving of her trouble with her father. Her approach to the symbolic nature of dreams will be linked to the ideas of Carl Jung who focuses on the dream symbols as keys to the hidden “nature” of one’s self. Finally, my reading of Anna Kavan’s Sleep Has His House will focus on the descriptions of her dreams and her unconscious as the inner world she inhabits at the expense of the exterior “reality”. Her exploration of the “nighttime language” through portraying her relation to her subconscious, and her use of this level of the consciousness as an internal feminine space of escape as well as her problematic relationship with her mother will be covered in detail. Her relationship to psychoanalysis and psychiatry will be examined through her sessions with Ludwig Binswanger, and through the symbolic nature of her dream descriptions and their connection with the theories of Carl Jung concerning the collective unconscious as well as the focus on the manifest content of dreams instead of the latent dream content emphasised by Sigmund Freud. |
| References |
| Primary Sources:
Anais Nin, House of Incest (1936) Anais Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin, Volume I, 1931-1934 (1966) Anais Nin, The Novel of the Future (1968) Anais Nin, In Favor of the Sensitive Man and the Other Essays (1976) Anna Kavan, Sleep Has His House (1948) Hilda Doolittle, Tribute to Freud (1956) Secondary Sources: Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) Sigmund Freud, “Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes”, (1925) Carl Gustav Jung, The Undiscovered Self (1958) Carl Gustav Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1969) Otto Rank, Truth and Reality (1936) Otto Rank, Beyond Psychology (1941) Hélène Cixous, Keith Cohen, and Paula Cohen. “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1976) Critical Sources: Miriam Fuchs, Ellen G. Friedman, Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction, (1989) A) Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Susan Stanford Friedman. “‘Woman Is Perfect’: H.D.’s Debate with Freud” (1981) Susan Stanford Friedman, Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D. (1987) B) Sharon Spencer, “Delivering the Woman Artist from the Silence of the Womb: Otto Rank's Influence on Anais Nin” (1982) Sharon Spencer, “The Music of the Womb: Anais Nin's "Feminine" Writing” Oliver Evans, “Anaïs Nin and the Discovery of Inner Space” (1962) C) Hannah Van Hove, “Exploring the Realm of the Unconscious in Anna Kavan’s Sleep Has His House” (2017) Victoria Carborne Walker, The Fiction of Anna Kavan (2012) Brian W. Aldiss, “Kafka's Sister” (1991) Jane Garrity, “Nocturnal Transgressions in "The House of Sleep": Anna Kavan's Maternal Registers” (1994) |