A Dynamic of Lacanian Pedagogy: Listening to the Poetic Unconscious of Dickinson and Stevens

A Dynamic of Lacanian Pedagogy: Listening to the Poetic Unconscious of Dickinson and Stevens

This essay explores how Lacanian pedagogical dynamics is beneficial to read modern poetry in the classroom. One of the key concepts in psychoanalysis is the unconscious, which makes Jacques Lacan distinct from Freudian scholars. Shoshana Felman employs the psychoanalytic concept, the unconscious, in showing the radical shift of position between teachers and students. The essay attempts to evince the poets’ concerns over the unconscious in their poems; Wallace Stevens juxtaposes imagination and the real in his verbal painting of mind-scape and Emily Dickinson shifts the position between master and slave or host and visitor. In their works, the replacement or displacement of the relationship between authors and readers is inevitable because the unconscious is not object, but speaking subject next to the conscious. For both poets, readers and authors are mutual cooperative listeners to the voice of the poetic unconscious.