Psychoanalytic literary criticism applies the principles of psychoanalysis pioneered by Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Jacques Lacan to interpret the psychological motivations of characters, authors, and readers. This critical school views literature as a manifestation of the unconscious mind, exploring phenomena such as repression, the Oedipus complex, dreams, defense mechanisms, and archetypes. By decoding symbols and hidden neuroses within texts, psychoanalytic critics uncover how repressed desires, trauma, and psychological splits shape narrative structures, making it an essential methodology for advanced literary analysis and academic examinations.
1. Which Viennese neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis provided the foundational concepts for psychoanalytic literary criticism?
Correct Answer: a) Sigmund Freud
Explanation:
Sigmund Freud founded psychoanalysis, introducing the unconscious, defense mechanisms, dream work, and Oedipal conflicts, which profoundly influenced literary interpretation.
2. What are the three components of the human psychic apparatus in Freud's structural model of the mind?
Correct Answer: a) Id, Ego, and Superego
Explanation:
Freud divided the psyche into the id (primitive drives), ego (mediating reality principle), and superego (moral conscience).
3. According to Freud, what mechanism transforms latent dream thoughts into the manifest content of a dream?
Correct Answer: a) Dream work
Explanation:
Dream work uses processes like condensation and displacement to disguise forbidden unconscious wishes in dreams, a process Freud compared to poetic composition.
4. What is the psychoanalytic concept of the 'Oedipus complex'?
Correct Answer: a) A child's unconscious desire for the opposite-sex parent and rivalry with the same-sex parent
Explanation:
Freud used Sophocles's tragedy 'Oedipus Rex' to name the universal childhood developmental crisis of parental rivalry and desire.
5. Which psychoanalytic theorist founded archetypal criticism, introducing the concepts of the collective unconscious and universal archetypes?
Correct Answer: a) Carl Jung
Explanation:
Carl Jung broke from Freud to propose a collective unconscious populated by inherited archetypes like the shadow, anima, and hero.
6. Which French psychoanalytic theorist re-read Freud through structural linguistics, arguing that 'the unconscious is structured like a language'?
Correct Answer: a) Jacques Lacan
Explanation:
Jacques Lacan integrated Saussurean linguistics with psychoanalysis, emphasizing the Symbolic order and the play of signifiers.
7. What is the psychoanalytic term for the redirection of feelings from a forbidden object onto a safe substitute?
Correct Answer: a) Displacement
Explanation:
Displacement involves shifting emotional intensity or attention from a threatening target to a safe, acceptable surrogate.
8. What is 'condensation' in psychoanalytic dream theory and literary analysis?
Correct Answer: a) The merging of multiple ideas, images, or wishes into a single compressed symbol or character
Explanation:
Condensation packs multiple unconscious meanings and figures into one composite symbol or character.
9. What is the 'uncanny' (Das Unheimliche), as analyzed by Sigmund Freud?
Correct Answer: a) An eerie psychological feeling where something familiar suddenly appears strangely terrifying or foreign
Explanation:
Freud explored the uncanny as repressed childhood material returning to consciousness, often evoked by doubles, automatons, and death.
10. Which French psychoanalyst and feminist wrote 'The Laugh of the Medusa', advocating for bodily-rooted writing?
Correct Answer: a) Hélène Cixous
Explanation:
Hélène Cixous combined psychoanalysis and feminism to champion 'écriture féminine' against phallogocentrism.
11. What is 'sublimation' in psychoanalytic theory?
Correct Answer: a) The channeling of primitive, unacceptable id impulses into socially valued, creative, or artistic pursuits
Explanation:
Freud viewed artistic creation and scientific inquiry as sublimated expressions of repressed libidinal energy.
12. Which psychoanalytic critic wrote 'The Dynamics of Literary Response' (1968), pioneering psychological reader-response criticism?
Correct Answer: a) Norman Holland
Explanation:
Norman Holland analyzed how readers unconsciously use literary texts to manage and adapt their own psychological fantasies.
13. What is the 'mirror stage' in Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory?
Correct Answer: a) The developmental phase where an infant recognizes its reflection, forming an idealized, idealized ego ideal that initiates the Imaginary order
Explanation:
Lacan's mirror stage demonstrates how human subjectivity is founded upon an external visual image and alienation.
14. What is the 'Imaginary' order in Lacanian psychoanalysis?
Correct Answer: a) The pre-linguistic realm of visual images, illusion, wholeness, and identification with the mirror image or mother
Explanation:
The Imaginary is characterized by duality, fantasy, and misrecognition before entry into language.
15. What is the 'Symbolic' order in Lacanian theory?
Correct Answer: a) The realm of language, culture, law, and the 'Name-of-the-Father' that separates the child from maternal fusion
Explanation:
Entry into the Symbolic order occurs through language and submission to the patriarchal Law-of-the-Father.
16. What is the 'Real' in Lacanian psychoanalysis?
Correct Answer: a) That which resists symbolization absolutely; the traumatic, unnameable bedrock of existence that lies beyond language
Explanation:
The Real is impossible to integrate into the Symbolic order, erupting as trauma, horror, or psychosis.
17. Which British psychoanalyst and object-relations theorist introduced the concepts of the 'good-enough mother' and the 'transitional object'?
Correct Answer: a) D.W. Winnicott
Explanation:
D.W. Winnicott's object-relations theory explored transitional objects (like teddy bears) and creative play spaces.
18. What is a 'transitional object' in Winnicottian psychoanalysis and literary criticism?
Correct Answer: a) A physical item (like a blanket or toy) that bridges the infant's internal fantasy world and external reality, foundational for art
Explanation:
Winnicott argued that cultural art and literature operate as transitional phenomena in adult life.
19. Which psychoanalytic critic wrote 'Literature and Psychoanalysis' and pioneered French psychoanalytic criticism in America?
Correct Answer: a) Shoshana Felman
Explanation:
Shoshana Felman explored the reciprocal relationship between psychoanalysis and literature, treating literature not as a case study, but as theoretical inquiry.
20. Which literary scholar wrote 'Reading for the Plot' (1984), applying Freudian psychoanalysis (specifically 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle') to narrative dynamics?
Correct Answer: a) Peter Brooks
Explanation:
Peter Brooks argued that narrative plots are driven by desire and the death drive, seeking a shaped ending (discharge).
21. According to Peter Brooks in 'Reading for the Plot', how does narrative desire function like Freudian drives?
Correct Answer: a) Narratives are fueled by eros (desire for connection and extension) and pushed toward closure by thanatos (the death drive/end point).
Explanation:
Brooks used Freud's 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' to explain how plots navigate delay toward the ultimate end.
22. What is 'projection' as a psychoanalytic defense mechanism?
Correct Answer: a) Attributing one's own unacceptable thoughts, feelings, or impulses onto another person
Explanation:
Projection involves disowning internal conflicts and falsely seeing them in external figures.
23. What is 'repression' in psychoanalytic theory?
Correct Answer: a) The unconscious mechanism that banishes traumatic memories, forbidden desires, and painful thoughts from conscious awareness
Explanation:
Repression keeps unacceptable unconscious material locked away, though it returns symptomatically in dreams, slips, and literature.
24. What is a 'freudian slip' (parapraxis)?
Correct Answer: a) An unintentional error in speech or action that reveals unconscious desires or suppressed thoughts
Explanation:
Parapraxis exposes how the unconscious leaks into everyday conscious behavior and literary dialogue.
25. Which psychoanalytic concept introduced by Harold Bloom examines how poets struggle psychologically against the shadow of their literary precursors?
Correct Answer: a) The Anxiety of Influence
Explanation:
Harold Bloom used Freudian defense mechanisms (like repression and displacement) to analyze poetic history as familial rivalry.
26. How did Sigmund Freud analyze literary creation in his essay 'Creative Writers and Day-dreaming' (1908)?
Correct Answer: a) He compared creative writing to children's play and adult day-dreaming, wherein authors fulfill repressed wishes through surrogate characters.
Explanation:
Freud linked art to wish-fulfillment and fantasy, softening the boundary between neurosis and creative imagination.
27. Which psychoanalytic critic and philosopher co-authored 'Anti-Oedipus', critiquing traditional psychoanalysis from a schizoanalytic and Marxist perspective?
Correct Answer: a) Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
Explanation:
Deleuze and Guattari attacked the bourgeois family triad of psychoanalysis, proposing desiring-machines and schizoanalysis.
28. What is 'schizoanalysis' as formulated by Deleuze and Guattari?
Correct Answer: a) A revolutionary critique of Freudian Oedipal familialism that views desire as a productive, fluid, non-familial flow across social fields
Explanation:
Schizoanalysis frees desire from the narrow confines of the nuclear family and neurosis.
29. What is 'splitting' in psychoanalytic theory (associated with Melanie Klein)?
Correct Answer: a) A defense mechanism where an individual divides experiences, people, or self into absolute all-good and all-bad categories
Explanation:
Melanie Klein showed how infants and characters handle anxiety through primitive splitting (e.g., wicked stepmother vs. idealized mother).
30. Which psychoanalytic critic applied Melanie Klein's object-relations theory to Gothic literature and the horror genre?
Correct Answer: a) Barbara Creed / Julia Kristeva
Explanation:
Barbara Creed's 'The Monstrous-Feminine' utilized Kristevan abjection and Kleinian psychoanalysis to analyze horror films.
31. What is 'abjection' according to Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytic semiotic theory?
Correct Answer: a) That which disturbs identity, system, and order (e.g., corpses, waste, bodily fluids); what must be radically expelled to form the subject
Explanation:
Abjection creates horror and fascination because it threatens the fragile border between self and non-self.
32. How did psychoanalytic literary criticism treat Shakespeare's 'Hamlet'?
Correct Answer: a) Freud famously diagnosed Hamlet's paralysis as a symptom of his repressed Oedipal hesitation to kill the uncle who enacted his own unconscious desires.
Explanation:
Freud's reading of 'Hamlet' in 'The Interpretation of Dreams' set a precedent for psychoanalytic character analysis.
33. Which psychoanalytic concept explains why characters in fiction often return repeatedly to self-destructive behaviors or traumatic memories?
Correct Answer: a) The death drive (Thanatos) / Repetition compulsion
Explanation:
Freud introduced the repetition compulsion to describe the unconscious drive to re-enact trauma in search of mastery.
34. What is 'rationalization' as a psychoanalytic defense mechanism?
Correct Answer: a) Constructing logical, self-justifying, but false excuses to explain away unacceptable behaviors or unconscious motives
Explanation:
Rationalization masks true instinctual motivations behind respectable intellectual justifications.
35. What is 'denial' in psychoanalytic theory?
Correct Answer: a) Refusing to accept external reality or traumatic facts because they are too painful to confront consciously
Explanation:
Denial blocks external reality from consciousness to protect the ego from overwhelming distress.
36. Which psychoanalytic critic wrote 'Psychoanalysis and Literary Process' (1970)?
Correct Answer: a) Frederick Crews
Explanation:
Frederick Crews was an influential American critic who famously moved from psychoanalytic criticism to skeptical critique of psychoanalysis.
37. How did Lionel Trilling view the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature in 'Freud and Literature' (1940)?
Correct Answer: a) He argued that psychoanalysis and literature share a profound kinship in exploring the dark complexities of human mind and desire.
Explanation:
Trilling celebrated how Freud validated the literary imagination's deep engagement with the unconscious.
38. What is 'regression' as a psychoanalytic defense mechanism?
Correct Answer: a) Reverting to an earlier, more infantile stage of psychological development under severe stress or anxiety
Explanation:
Regression offers emotional safe harbor by retreating to childhood coping mechanisms.
39. What is 'reaction formation' in psychoanalytic theory?
Correct Answer: a) Converting unconscious, unacceptable impulses into their exact opposite in conscious behavior
Explanation:
Reaction formation manifests as exaggerated displays of the opposite emotion (e.g., intense hatred masked as excessive politeness).
40. Which psychoanalytic concept refers to the psychological energy associated with sexual and life instincts?
Correct Answer: a) Libido
Explanation:
Freud defined libido as the psychic drive or energy animating eros and life instincts.
41. What is 'Thanatos' in Freudian psychoanalytic theory?
Correct Answer: a) The death drive; the unconscious urge toward destruction, dissolution, and a return to inanimate inorganic peace
Explanation:
Freud introduced Thanatos alongside Eros to explain human aggression and self-destructive repetition.
42. Which psychoanalytic theorist introduced the concept of 'penis envy' and maternal attachment in female development?
Correct Answer: a) Sigmund Freud
Explanation:
Freud's theories of female psychosexual development sparked intense feminist critique by theorists like Horney and Irigaray.
43. How did psychoanalytic criticism approach the analysis of authorial biographies?
Correct Answer: a) By treating the author's life, neuroses, and childhood traumas as the latent matrix generating the manifest text.
Explanation:
Biographical psychoanalytic criticism reads texts as clinical symptoms of the author's unconscious psychic life.
44. What is 'pathography' in psychoanalytic literary biography?
Correct Answer: a) A biographical approach that pathologizes an author, reducing their art to clinical neurosis or mental illness
Explanation:
Pathography was criticized for treating great literature merely as a case study in psychological pathology.
45. Which psychoanalytic concept did Jacques Lacan use to explain how desire is perpetually unfulfilled because the lost object of maternal union can never be regained?
Correct Answer: a) The objet petit a (object cause of desire)
Explanation:
Lacan's 'objet a' represents the unattainable object of lost plenitude that perpetually fuels human desire.
46. What is 'phallic motherhood' or the phallic mother in psychoanalysis?
Correct Answer: a) The infant's initial fantasy that the all-powerful mother possesses the phallus (complete omnipotence)
Explanation:
The phallic mother represents infantile dependency before the father's intervention breaks maternal fusion.
47. Which psychoanalytic critic wrote 'The Madwoman in the Attic', examining female literary anxiety of authorship?
Correct Answer: a) Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar
Explanation:
Gilbert and Gubar utilized feminist psychoanalysis to examine how Victorian women writers wrestled with patriarchal anxiety and split identities.
48. What is 'anxiety of authorship' in Gilbert and Gubar's psychoanalytic feminist literary theory?
Correct Answer: a) The radical fear and paralysis female authors felt because literary creation was historically defined as an exclusively male prerogative
Explanation:
Female authors faced a profound anxiety of authorship because the pen was metaphorically viewed as a male organ.
49. How does psychoanalytic literary criticism view monsters, vampires, and ghosts in literature?
Correct Answer: a) As externalized projections of repressed unconscious fears, forbidden sexual desires, or cultural taboos
Explanation:
Monsters in Gothic and horror literature embody the return of the repressed psyche and social anxieties.
50. Which psychoanalytic theorist founded ego psychology, expanding the ego's autonomous functions beyond mere mediation with the id?
Correct Answer: a) Anna Freud and Heinz Hartmann
Explanation:
Ego psychology (led by Anna Freud and Hartmann) focused on defense mechanisms and the ego's adaptive capacities.
51. What is 'identification' as a psychoanalytic mechanism?
Correct Answer: a) The psychological process whereby an individual adopts the traits, values, or behaviors of another person (often a parent or literary hero)
Explanation:
Readers and characters form deep identifications with fictional figures, modeling their ego ideal upon them.
52. Which psychoanalytic concept refers to the infantile stage where the mouth is the primary site of sensual pleasure?
Correct Answer: a) Oral stage
Explanation:
Freud's first stage of psychosexual development is the oral stage, associated with nursing, incorporation, and dependency.
53. What is the 'anal stage' in Freudian psychosexual development?
Correct Answer: a) The developmental stage focused on bowel control, autonomy, order, and retention
Explanation:
Freud linked the anal stage to themes of power, cleanliness, stubbornness, and hoarding.
54. What is the 'phallic stage' in psychosexual development?
Correct Answer: a) The stage where children discover anatomical sexual differences and experience the Oedipal crisis
Explanation:
The phallic stage centers on sexual curiosity, castration anxiety, and Oedipal rivalries.
55. What is 'castration anxiety' in psychoanalytic theory?
Correct Answer: a) A male child's unconscious fear of losing his genitals as punishment for forbidden Oedipal desires toward the mother
Explanation:
Castration anxiety forces the boy to abandon Oedipal rivalry and internalize the paternal law (superego).
56. Which psychoanalytic critic wrote 'The Structural Study of Myth' (though an anthropologist, Lévi-Strauss used structural psychoanalytic ideas)?
Correct Answer: a) Claude Lévi-Strauss
Explanation:
Lévi-Strauss applied structural binary models to myth, intersecting with psychoanalytic interest in universal human mental structures.
57. How did psychoanalytic criticism interpret the double (doppelgänger) motif in literature (e.g., Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde)?
Correct Answer: a) As the splitting of the ego, representing the externalization of repressed id impulses and socially forbidden desires
Explanation:
The double embodies the repressed shadow self that civilized ego consciousness tries to disown.
58. Which psychoanalytic concept explains why jokes and witty puns release repressed psychic energy and provide sudden pleasure?
Correct Answer: a) The economy of psychic expenditure / Economy of release
Explanation:
In 'Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious', Freud argued that jokes bypass censorship to release pent-up psychic energy as laughter.
59. What is 'fetishism' in psychoanalytic theory?
Correct Answer: a) A defense mechanism where a specific object or body part is substituted for the maternal phallus to ward off castration anxiety
Explanation:
Freud defined fetishism as a disavowal of castration, fixating on an object to represent the missing maternal phallus.
60. Which psychoanalytic theorist introduced the concept of the 'personal unconscious' versus the 'collective unconscious'?
Correct Answer: a) Carl Jung
Explanation:
Jung distinguished between the repressed personal unconscious (Freud's domain) and the inherited collective unconscious.
61. What is an 'archetype' in Jungian psychoanalytic criticism?
Correct Answer: a) An inherited, universal symbolic pattern, image, or motif residing in the collective unconscious across all human cultures
Explanation:
Jungian critics trace recurring archetypes like the hero, shadow, wise old man, and great mother in world literature.
62. What is the 'shadow' in Jungian psychoanalysis?
Correct Answer: a) The unconscious, repressed, or darker side of the human personality that the conscious ego rejects
Explanation:
The shadow embodies animal instincts and undesirable traits that the conscious ego refuses to acknowledge.
63. What is the 'anima' and 'animus' in Jungian theory?
Correct Answer: a) The unconscious feminine archetype in a man (anima) and the unconscious masculine archetype in a woman (animus)
Explanation:
Jung argued that psychological wholeness requires integrating these inner opposite-sex archetypes.
64. Which psychoanalytic critic wrote 'The Wound and the Bow' (1941), exploring the link between psychological trauma and artistic genius?
Correct Answer: a) Edmund Wilson
Explanation:
Edmund Wilson examined the Philoctetes myth to argue that artistic genius is frequently bound to a psychological wound.
65. How did psychoanalytic criticism approach the study of dreams within narrative fiction?
Correct Answer: a) By applying Freudian dream-work analysis (condensation, displacement) to decode the latent thematic meaning of fictional dream sequences.
Explanation:
Literary dreams are analyzed using the same psychoanalytic tools Freud used for clinical patient dreams.
66. Which psychoanalytic concept explains the compulsive repetition of literary tropes across centuries?
Correct Answer: a) The repetition compulsion
Explanation:
Repetition compulsion drives both human neurosis and the cultural recycling of foundational narrative archetypes.
67. What is 'isolation' as a psychoanalytic defense mechanism?
Correct Answer: a) Separating a traumatic memory or thought from its emotional charge, discussing horrific events with clinical coldness
Explanation:
Isolation protects the ego from emotional overwhelm by compartmentalizing thought from feeling.
68. What is 'undoing' as a defense mechanism in psychoanalysis?
Correct Answer: a) A symbolic act or ritual performed to magically cancel out or reverse a previous unacceptable thought or action
Explanation:
Undoing attempts to wipe away guilt through compulsive atonement rituals.
69. Which psychoanalytic theorist founded individual psychology and introduced the concept of the 'inferiority complex'?
Correct Answer: a) Alfred Adler
Explanation:
Alfred Adler broke with Freud to emphasize social drives, striving for superiority, and overcoming inferiority feelings.
70. How did psychoanalytic criticism analyze the Gothic trope of the haunted castle or ancestral mansion?
Correct Answer: a) As an architectural metaphor for the human mind, where secret rooms and basements represent the repressed unconscious.
Explanation:
The haunted house in Gothic fiction externalizes the haunted, divided psyche of the characters.
71. Which psychoanalytic critic wrote 'Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne'?
Correct Answer: a) Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose
Explanation:
Mitchell and Rose introduced Lacanian psychoanalysis to Anglo-American feminist theory.
72. What is 'transference' in psychoanalytic theory and how does it apply to reading literature?
Correct Answer: a) The unconscious shifting of emotions experienced toward one figure onto another, which readers experience toward authors, narrators, or characters.
Explanation:
Psychoanalytic readers often undergo transference onto texts, investing personal emotional stakes in fictional entities.
73. What is 'counter-transference' in psychoanalysis?
Correct Answer: a) The analyst's emotional and unconscious reactions toward the patient
Explanation:
Counter-transference requires therapists to monitor their own unconscious projections onto patients.
74. Which psychoanalytic concept refers to the total integration of conscious and unconscious elements, representing psychological maturity in Jungian theory?
Correct Answer: a) Individuation
Explanation:
Jungian individuation is the lifelong process of psychological self-realization and integration of unconscious archetypes.
75. How did psychoanalytic critics analyze fairy tales (e.g., Bruno Bettelheim's 'The Uses of Enchantment')?
Correct Answer: a) As therapeutic psychological instruments that help children symbolically master internal developmental anxieties and Oedipal conflicts.
Explanation:
Bettelheim argued that fairy tales address deep unconscious childhood fears and provide symbolic paths toward psychological maturation.
76. Which psychoanalytic critic wrote 'The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction', bridging psychoanalysis and semiotics?
Correct Answer: a) Jonathan Culler
Explanation:
Jonathan Culler explored how structuralist semiotics and psychoanalytic reading strategies intersect in literary interpretation.
77. What is 'conversion hysteria' in Freudian psychoanalysis?
Correct Answer: a) Psychological distress or repressed trauma manifesting as physical bodily symptoms (e.g., paralysis, blindness) without organic cause
Explanation:
Freud studied hysteria extensively, showing how mental trauma speaks physically through the body.
78. Which psychoanalytic concept explains the profound sense of loss experienced when separating from the maternal body?
Correct Answer: a) Primary repression / Loss of the maternal object
Explanation:
Separation from maternal plenitude initiates the human condition of perpetual lack and desire.
79. How did psychoanalytic criticism influence queer theory?
Correct Answer: a) Through Lacanian and Freudian theories of fluid desire, non-normative identifications, and the critique of fixed Oedipal identity norms.
Explanation:
Queer theorists (like Butler and Sedgwick) deeply engaged with psychoanalysis to dismantle rigid heteronormative developmental models.
80. Which psychoanalytic critic wrote 'Hamlet and Oedipus' (1910), expanding Freud's reading of Shakespeare?
Correct Answer: a) Ernest Jones
Explanation:
Ernest Jones (Freud's biographer) wrote the definitive psychoanalytic study of Hamlet's unconscious Oedipal block.
81. What is 'primary process thinking' in psychoanalytic theory?
Correct Answer: a) Unconscious thought operating via the pleasure principle, characterized by condensation, displacement, and timeless imagery (found in dreams and art)
Explanation:
Primary process contrasts with secondary process logical reality-testing, dominating dreams and poetic association.
82. What is 'secondary process thinking' in psychoanalysis?
Correct Answer: a) Conscious, logical, reality-oriented thinking governed by the ego and the reality principle
Explanation:
Secondary process enables rational planning, adaptation, and objective engagement with the external world.
83. Which psychoanalytic concept describes the ego's mechanism of turning hostile aggressive impulses away from others and directing them inward against the self?
Correct Answer: a) Melancholia / Introjection of aggression
Explanation:
Freud distinguished mourning from melancholia, noting that melancholia involves turning lost object-love and anger inward as self-reproach.
84. How does psychoanalytic literary criticism interpret the trope of blindness in tragedy (e.g., Oedipus blinding himself)?
Correct Answer: a) As a symbolic self-castration and a punishment for forbidden Oedipal insight or taboo visual knowledge.
Explanation:
Physical blindness in tragedy symbolically enacts castration and the terrible price of confronting forbidden unconscious truth.
85. Which psychoanalytic critic wrote 'The Sense of an Ending' (though Frank Kermode combined narrative theory and time, his work touched psychological closure)?
Correct Answer: a) Frank Kermode
Explanation:
Frank Kermode explored psychological and narrative need for concordance, plotting, and fictional endings.
86. What is the ultimate objective of applying psychoanalytic theory to literary texts?
Correct Answer: a) To uncover the latent unconscious desires, psychic conflicts, and repressed fantasies operating beneath the manifest surface of the narrative.
Explanation:
Psychoanalytic criticism decodes the unconscious subtext of literature, illuminating the deep psychological undercurrents of human art.
