Meet the Author: Benjamin H. Ogden

Brill Library Book Series:

Meet the Author: Benjamin H. Ogden

Wednesday, October 10, 2018

7:30 pm

Presenter: Benjamin H. Ogden

Beyond Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism: Between Literature and Mind challenges the tradition of applied psychoanalysis that has long dominated psychoanalytic literary criticism. Benjamin H. Ogden, a literary scholar, proposes that a new form of analytic literary criticism take its place, one that begins from a place of respect for the mystery of literature and the complexity of its inner-workings.

In this book, through readings of authors such as J.M. Coetzee, Flannery O’Connor, and Vladimir Nabokov, the mysteries upon which literary works rely for their enduring power are enumerated and studied. Such mysteries are thereafter interwoven into a series of pioneering studies of how the analytic conceptions of thinking, dreaming, and losing become meaningful within the unique aesthetic conditions of individual novels and poems. Each chapter is a provisional solution to the difficult “bridging problems” that arise when literary figures work in the psychoanalytic space, and when psychoanalysts attempt to make use of literature for analytic purposes.

This talk will address the current place of psychoanalysis within literary studies, and will invite attendees to discuss how literature and psychoanalysis can be put into conservation without detracting from the essence of either field.

No CME/CE credits will be offered.

Benjamin H. Ogden is Assistant Teaching Professor in the College of Arts and Letters at Stevens Institute of Technology. He co-authored the Routledge title The Analyst’s Ear and the Critic’s Eye: Rethinking Psychoanalysis and Literature with Thomas H. Ogden. He has written for the New York Times Book Review, Times Literary Supplement, and authored numerous academic articles on the work of authors such as J.M. Coetzee, Samuel Beckett, and William Faulkner.