This is “End-of-Chapter Assessment”, section 3.11 from the book Creating Literary Analysis (v. 1.0). For details on it (including licensing), click here.

For more information on the source of this book, or why it is available for free, please see the project's home page. You can browse or download additional books there. To download a .zip file containing this book to use offline, simply click here.

Has this book helped you? Consider passing it on:
Help Creative Commons
Creative Commons supports free culture from music to education. Their licenses helped make this book available to you.
Help a Public School
DonorsChoose.org helps people like you help teachers fund their classroom projects, from art supplies to books to calculators.

3.11 End-of-Chapter Assessment

Key Takeaways

In this chapter, we examined in depth three major approaches to psychoanalytic literary theory following Freud, Lacan, and Jung:

  • For Freud: You learned about the pleasure and reality principles, the notion of the unconscious, the stages of sexual development, dreams as the road to the unconscious, and how to apply a Freudian reading to a text.
  • For Lacan: You learned how Lacan took Freud’s ideas and placed them in language acquisition, which can be seen in the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real stages, and ultimately how to apply a Lacanian reading to a text.
  • For Jung: You learned how Jung broke away from Freud to define the collective unconsciousness, which contains universal archetypes—the Self, shadow, anima, and animus being central archetypes—and ultimately how to apply a Jungian reading to a text.
  • You were given the opportunity to see the psychoanalytic methodology practiced in three student papers.
  • You learned about the importance of the writing process, including peer review and the strategies for conducting peer review. Many of you also participated in peer review for your psychoanalytic paper.
  • You wrote an analysis of a work of literature using one of the theories by Freud, Lacan, or Jung.

Writing Exercises

  1. Freewriting exercise. Choose a short poem (no more than fifteen lines) you’ve never read before. Read through it several times. As you read the poem, jot down ideas that may relate to a psychoanalytic reading; in particular, consider how the poem could be read from a Freudian, Lacanian, and Jungian perspective.
  2. Make a claim about the poem for each theory. What claim seems the most productive? The least productive? Discuss why a particular theory works best for the poem.

Instructor Supplement: Class Peer Review

  1. Have students conduct peer review on one of the sample papers using the organizational peer-review guide found in Chapter 10 "Appendix A: Peer Review Sheets", Section 10.2 "Chapter 3: Psychoanalysis":

    1. Place students in groups of three to four and have them reread the paper for peer review and fill out the guide sheet.
    2. Have students discuss their feedback responses to the sample paper.
    3. Have students list the major feedback they discussed.
    4. Put the major issues on the blackboard or whiteboard.
    5. Discuss these responses. Make certain that you let students know that any paper can be improved.

  2. Plan to have your students conduct peer review on the drafts of their papers that they are writing in your class. Use the peer-review guide from Chapter 10 "Appendix A: Peer Review Sheets", Section 10.2 "Chapter 3: Psychoanalysis" and have them work in groups of three and do the following:

    1. Bring two hard copies of their paper so that each member can read the paper, OR work in a computer lab where students can share their papers online. You may want to use the educational software that your campus supports—for example, Blackboard or Moodle—or you can have students use Google Drive to set up their peer-review groups.
    2. Have two students focus on the first paper in the group. While these students are reading, have the other student read the other two student papers.
    3. The two students should quickly fill out the peer-review sheet and then have a brief conversation about the strengths of the paper and ways the paper could be improved.
    4. Move to the next student and follow the same process. Depending on the length of your class, you may have to reduce the peer-review groups to two students.
    5. If time permits, ask the students to provide general comments—or ask questions—about the specific papers or the assignment overall.
    6. You may want to use peer review for each paper in your class.