| In this work, I have designed and applied a theory of literary imagination utilizing a dream model. I did not arrive at my conclusions through a psychoanalysis of poet/writer/playwright or the characters within any given text. I did so through a close examination of process in the case of dreaming and literary imagination. I began with an analysis of the state of waking and sleeping mentation to establish that the two states are not mutually exclusive. In Chapter I, my research proves that there exists a functioning of unconscious processing in the waking state and conscious, waking-style processing in the dream state. Then, in Chapter II, I set up a tripartite model of literary imagination in which secondary revision is the pivotal element. My tripartite model presents three worlds of literary imagination. Secondary revision emerges between the second and third worlds of literary imagination. The relationship between the dreamer and the writer is made clear in this model as well. In Chapters III, IV and V, I applied my theory to the works of W. B. Yeats, Dylan Thomas, August Strindberg, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Virgina Woolf and Marcel Proust. I concluded that the dream-work and the image-work of writers occurs in the space between the unconscious and the preconscious. I found that this space is potentially more important in literary terms for the process of secondary revision than it is in dreaming. Through the application to modern literary texts, I discovered that image-work inherently incorporates the functions of secondary revision. In a parallel manner, this echoes back to Freud's dilemma about placing secondary revision inside and/or outside dream-work. Therefore certain literary structures are made possible through secondary revision: poetic symbol, condensed and displaced images, mise-en-scene, splitting and merging of characters, suspension of meaningful action, collapse of time, narrative memory, narrative voice, and interior monologue and these inform our understanding of the process of literary imagination. |
