Recognizing Your Characters [Margaret Crastnopol]

Using contemporary psychoanalysis as our guide, we’ll investigate works from Virginia Woolf, Philip Roth, and Maria Semple to discover what makes their characters so vivid, instructive, and often therapeutic for readers. Using cutting-edge analytic concepts like narcissistic injury, attachment, psychic structure, and micro-trauma, we will examine how to think and write about a self ‘s particularities. If you have a character study started, real or fictional, bring it to class to be explored with an eye toward deepening and complicating the portrayal of a self.