Jungian Metaphor in Modernist Literature argues for the centrality of Carl Jung’s theory of individuation and alchemy in modernist poetics. Through analysis of the uses of a mythic method in modernist literary works, the book develops a related alchemical model which serves to expand understanding of modernist uses of language.
The book is an innovative exploration of modernist literary creativity under a Jungian lens, spanning both the literary and scholarly Jungian field. The literary works of Hilda Doolittle, James Joyce and W.B Yeats are read in the light of Jung’s central theme of an ‘alchemical marriage’ with attempts at developing a related alchemical model, a Jungian poetics, which serves to expand a reader’s understanding of modernist uses of language. This provides a fresh new lens through which modernist literature is viewed and seeks to revaluate the role of Jung in the humanities, namely in the field of modernist literature, an area from which Jung has long been shunned.
This book will be of great interest for academics, researchers and post-graduate students in the fields of literature, modernism, psychoanalysis, gender studies, Jungian psychology, depth psychology, literary theory, and cultural studies.
New to me is Dib’s look at what Rimbaud called “Alchemy of the Word,” the experiments made by poets Hilda Doolittle and W. B. Yeats and novelist James Joyce to use language as a tool for transformation. I’m especially grateful for Dib’s section on H.D., who “places a great importance on language as a center of consciousness, a purification vessel, and a means for liberation (of the feminine).” Often times we focus on how an artist uses Jungian psychology for personal growth. Here Dib explores individuation from a different perspective: how language and image are metaphoric and alchemical tools that lead to transformation within a poem, even in the experience of a character in a novel as the story progresses. Dib’s book makes a numinous connection with the creative life of metaphor and story.