English Studies at NBU

14

Authors: Solomon Awuzie

Psychoanalysis as a literary theory has helped to improve understanding about “human behaviour and human mental functioning.” This is achieved through its perception of the human race as neurotic. However, with its application in poetic interpretation, poetry is perceived as an expression of displaced neurotic conflict: a consoling illusion, symptom, socially acceptable phantasy or substitute gratification. With the psychoanalytic reading of the poetry of Tanure Ojaide, an Anglophone African poet, poetry is understood as an expression of symptoms of the poet’s personal and societal neurotic tendencies. Since our emphasis is on Jungian psychoanalysis, analyzing Ojaide’s poetry through the orbits of the archetypes of Jungian psychoanalysis help to foreground the poetry as a consoling illusion or substitute gratification. Whereas the study reveals that Ojaide’s poetry is dominated by the archetype of the “wounded healer” - a symbol of a wounded personality who also doubles as the needed messiah (the healer), it is depicted that the dominant nature of the archetype of the “wounded healer” is a result of the poet’s experience which is at the centre of his poetic expression.

22

Authors: Elma Dedovic-Atilla

The paper explores the revolutionary spirit of literary works of two Romantic poets: George Gordon Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. In the period of conservative early 19th century English society that held high regard for propriety, tradition, decorum, conventions and institutionalized religion, the two poets’ multi-layered rebellious and subversive writing and thinking instigated public uproar and elitist outrage, threatening to undermine traditional concepts and practices. Acting as precursors to new era notions and liberties, their opuses present literary voices of protest against 19th century social, religious, moral and literary conventions. Their revolutionary and non-conformist methods and ideas are discussed and analyzed in this paper through three works of theirs: Byron’s The Vision of Judgement and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound.