Posted on Friday, October 9, 2009
Dr. Bethany Hicok, Westminster College associate professor of English, will present "'Revolutionary Intersections': Freud, Modernism, and Belief in Wallace Stevens" at the Bleasby Colloquium Thursday, Oct. 22, at 7 p.m. in the Sebastian Mueller Theater of the McKelvey Campus Center. The program is free and open to the public.
Hicok's talk will reconstruct what she terms the "revolutionary intersections" in modernist poetry made possible by Freud's emerging psychoanalytic theories in the 20th century. More specifically, she will focus on the American poet Wallace Stevens and his response to the "cultural" Freud in the 1930s and early '40s in his poetry and prose.
Her purpose is to show the ways that Freud's essay The Future of an Illusion provided an essential framework for Stevens' thinking about both the search for belief and the dangers of totalitarianism as Hitler marched across Europe, Stalin took power in Russia, and Mussolini and the fascists took over Italy.
Stevens read Freud carefully and, in his poetry of the period, developed strategies to resist the seductions of totalitarianism and authoritarian religion.
"The talk, which is part of an essay I'm working on for publication, is part of a longer book project that considers the public role of the poet in times of social, political, and economic crises," Hicok said. "I'm focusing specifically on the 1930s, the years of the Great Depression, and those leading up to World War II."
Hicok, who joined the Westminster faculty in 2001, earned an undergraduate degree from Russell Sage College and two masters and a Ph.D. from the University of Rochester.
Contact Hicok at (724) 946-6349 or e-mail hicokbf@westminster.edu for additional information.
