Literature and Psychology

ELIT 480 reads literary modernism alongside the rise of modern psychology, asking how fiction learned to render minds—stream of consciousness, interior monologue, melancholia, the disoriented crowd-self of the metropolis—and what those techniques reveal that clinical language cannot. You work through Dostoevsky, Poe, Gilman, Dujardin, and Karinthy in tandem with Simmel, William James, Freud, and Sacks, with assessment built on two take-home essays, an in-class midterm, and a group research presentation. As a senior ELIT elective, it consolidates the close-reading and theory training of earlier courses into a focused study of cognitive poetics and psychopathology, useful groundwork for thesis work or graduate study at the literature–mind intersection.