Norman Holland

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Norman Holland is an American literary critic and theorist who has focused on humans' responses to literature, film, and other arts. He is known for his work in psychoanalytic criticism, reader-response criticism, and the application of neuroscience and cognitive science to literature.

Contents

[edit] Career and biography

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Born in Manhattan in 1927, and raised there, Holland was destined by his family to be a patent lawyer. He received a B. S. in electrical engineering from M.I.T. (1947) and a J.D. from Harvard Law School (1950). Following a literary bent, however, he abandoned the law and received a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1956. He returned to M.I.T.'s humanities department, where he taught until 1966, becoming chair of the literature section. During his years in Boston, Holland trained at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, graduating in 1966. He became chair and later, McNulty Professor, at the English Department at the State University of New York at Buffalo. In 1983, he accepted the Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar's chair at the University of Florida.

He married Jane Kelley in 1954. They have two children and six grandchildren.

[edit] Criticism and theory

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[edit] Formalist ("New") criticism

Holland began his career with two books of formalist (or textual or "New") criticism. The first was a definitive study of the three major writers of Restoration comedy: The First Modern Comedies (1959). The second was The Shakespearean Imagination (1964) based on a television series he created for WGBH-TV in Boston. In 2006, he returned to formalist criticism by combining his own brand of reader-response criticism (see below) with analyses of eight classic films in Meeting Movies.

[edit] Psychoanalytic criticism

Holland began his psychoanalytic writings with Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare (1966). Based on a survey of everything psychoanalystic writers had said about Shakespeare up to that time, Holland critiqued psychoanalystic method and proposed important new directions for psychoanalytic criticism. In particular, he urged psychoanalytic critics to study real people, the audiences and readers of literature, rather than imaginary characters and long-dead or otherwise inaccessible writers.

His proposals led to The Dynamics of Literary Response (1968), probably his best-known book. In it, Holland developed the idea that our experience of a literary work was a process of transformation from unconscious fantasy material toward the "sense" or "meaning" that both critics and ordinary people demand from literary works.

Holland has continued to write occasional psychoanalytic studies, and his psychoanalytic training has influenced all his later work. In 1989, for example, he edited with Bernard J. Paris and Sidney Homan, two Florida colleagues, Shakespeare's Personality, a collection of psychoanalytic essays. 1990 brought Holland's Guide to Psychoanalytic Psychology and Literature-and-psychology.

[edit] Reader-response criticism

In 1973, Holland published Poems in Persons, extensively revised in 2000, and in 1975 5 Readers Reading, books reflecting his radical shift from the formalist and Dynamics assumption that texts define responses. He had conducted case studies of particular readers reading and free associating to particular poems and stories. He concluded from the evidence that it is readers and audiences who shape literary experiences.

Holland introduced the concept of "identity," drawn from the writings of psychoanalyst Heinz Lichtenstein. Lichtenstein had demonstrated that one could read someone's personality in terms of a core "identity theme" established in early object relations. Subsequent behaviors played out variations on that theme (like a theme-and-variations in music). Evidenced by analyses of readers' free associations to poems and stories, Holland concluded that readers' personalities ("identities' in Lichtenstein's sense) governed their readings. Dynamics had claimed that the text dictated the fantasies and transformations he had described there. But his experience with actual readers showed that these fantasies and their transformations varied greatly from individual to individual, depending on the individual identity.

Critics of Holland said that his claim that literary experiences depended on what readers did with texts, meant that texts did not exist. In fact, Holland had said nothing at all about texts. He had only demonstrated what readers actually did. And he continued to write about actual readers in a variety of later writings, for example, in Laughing (1982), where he showed how personality generated a person's particular "sense of humor." In several articles in the '90s, he extended reader-response theory to reading on computers. Meeting Movies (2006) extended reader-response criticism to eight classic films.

[edit] Reader-response teaching

During the 1970s, Holland and his co-worker at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Murray Schwartz, developed a style of reader-response teaching which they called the "Delphi seminar." In such a seminar, for the first part of the semester, students (and instructors) wrote "whatever came to mind" (that is, free associations) to poems and stories. In the second part, the students and instructors took one another's free associations as the text to which they responded. The seminars provided those who participated in them a sense of their own style of responding to literary texts and to other people, in short, a sense of their own identities. In 1992, Holland published a mystery story based on this kind of teaching, Death in a Delphi Seminar.

[edit] Literature and cognitive science

Holland had shown about people's responses to literature that one can only perceive a work of art through some human act of perception (and our perceptions, the psychologists tell us, are necessarily colored by personality or, in Holland's key term, "identity"). There is no "god's eye view," although both formalist and postmodern literary critics tend to assume that there is.

Holland generalized from these conclusions about the arts to what he described as his magnum opus, "a book about human nature," The I (1985). In this book, more psychological than literary, he extended the holistic method he had used in case studies of readers to suggest general processes of perception and symbolization applicable throughout life. He developed a "model of mind," based on psychological concepts of feedback, showing how individuals both used and were constrained by their bodies, by their culture, and by their "interpretive communities." And he meshed his views on the role of identity in people's perceptions and behavior with the stages of childhood and adult development described by psychoanalysts.

In The Brain of Robert Frost (1988), he began introducing ideas from brain science into his model. In particular, he drew on the "growing and ungrowing" of the brain in mammalian development to show how an identity theme might come into being. He also developed a three-tier feedback model of the mind. The brain (or mind) hypothesizes about its world through physiology, through fixed codes and flexible canons derived from culture, and through personal identity. He further developed this model in The Critical I (1992), a strenuous attack on the postmodern idea of the disappearance of the self.

Holland's work after 2000 consisted of understanding literary processes through neuropsychology and the new field of neuro-psychoanalysis. One major project has been called "The Brain and the Book." It set out what brain science can tell us about such literary and artistic matters as , form, style, the "willing suspension of disbelief," why we think of imaginary people as real, why we have real emotions toward them, and the origin and ultimate purpose of literature.

[edit] Lectures and other public activities

Holland lectured at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and hundreds of other American universities, professional conferences, and psychoanalytic venues. Typical titles during the '00s were: "Tickled Rats and Human Laughter," "The Neuroscience of Metafiction," and "Hamlet's Big Toe." During his career, Holland lectured all over the world, not only in such familiar places as London, Paris, Rome, or Berlin, but in Sapporo, Benares, and even Katmandu. Writings of his were translated into Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Magyar, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Turkic.

He was for two years (1957-59) "The Film Critic" on WGBH-TV in Boston, and he subsequently created a program, The Shakespearean Imagination, for WGBH and Harvard. He has appeared on television and radio numerous times since. He continued to write on film off and on throughout his career.

He founded and co-moderated (with Murray Schwartz) an online discussion group devoted to psychology and the arts, PSYART. And he founded and co-edited (with Murray Schwartz) an online journal also devoted to psychological study of the arts, PsyArt. Together with Schwartz and Andrew Gordon of the University of Florida he helped conduct the annual International Conference in Literature-and-Psychology. He also established the PsyArt Foundation to perpetuate these activities.

[edit] Sources

Holland's web site (http://www.normholland.com or http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/nnh/) provides a photograph, complete bibliography, autobiographical essays, and some downloadable essays and books.

[edit] Analysis or summary of Norman Holland's work

Bates, Robin. "Personal Reading Histories: A Useful Tool in the Effort to Map Reading Communities." American Literature for Non-American Readers: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on American Literature. Ed. Meta Grosman. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1995. pp. 113-22.

Freund, Elizabeth. The Return of the Reader: Reader-Response Criticism. London and New York: Methuen, 1987.

Gana, Nouri. "The Specter of Relativism: A Critical Review of Norman Holland's Models of Reader-Response." Modern Criticism. Ed. Christopher Rollason (ed. and preface) and Rajeshwar Mittapalli (ed. and preface). New Delhi, India: Atlantic, 2002. pp. 25-59.

García Landa, José Ángel. "A Bibliography of Literary Theory, Criticism and Philology." http://www.unizar.es/departamentos/filologia_inglesa/garciala/bibliography.html. 11th ed.

Groden, Michael, and Martin Kreiswirth, eds. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. s.v Psychoanalytic Theory and Criticism.

Jofré, Manuel Alcides. "Teoría literaria, psicoanálisis y estética de la recepción literaria: Entrevista a Norman N. Holland (24 de marzo de 1988, Gainesville, Florida)." Literatura y Linguistica, 2 (1988-1989): 173-87.

Kann, David J. "Reading One's Self and Others: Holland's Approach to Interpretive Behavior." Psychological Perspectives on Literature: Freudian Dissidents and Non-Freudians: A Casebook. Ed. Joseph Natoli. Hamden, CT: Archon, 1984. 120-133.

McCormick, Kathleen. "Theory in the Reader: Bleich, Holland, and Beyond." College English, 47.8 (1985 Dec): 836-51.

Paris, Diana. Norman Holland y la Articulación Literatura/psicoanálisis. Madrid: Campo de Ideas, 2004.

Preminger, Alex and T. V. F. Brogan, eds. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 1993. s.vv. "Psychological Criticism," "Reader-Response Criticism."

Richter, David H. "Norman N. Holland." The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. David H. Richter. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989. P. 1232.

Schwartz, Murray M. "Keynote Speaker: Norman N. Holland." Academy Forum (American Academy of Psychoanalysis) 27.2 (Summer 1983): 13.

St. Pierre, Cheryl Ann. "Short Stories: A Verbal and Visual Process of Interpretation (Volumes I and II)." Dissertation Abstracts International, 53:12 (1993 June), 4307A.

Suleiman, Susan R. and Inge Crosman, eds. The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation. Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 1980.

Tompkins, Jane P., ed. Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980.

Westlund, Joseph. "Norman N. Holland," Dictionary of Literary Biography: Modern American Critics Since 1955. Ed. Gregory S. Jay. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Research Group. 67: 162-166.

Wright, Elizabeth E. Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reappraisal. 2d ed. New York: Routledge, 1998.

[edit] Biographical data

Directory of American Scholars. Tenth edition, Volume 2: English, Speech, & Drama. Detroit: Gale Group, 2002.

International Authors and Writers Who's Who. 12th edition. Ed. Ernest Kay. Cambridge, England: International Biographical Centre, 1991.

Who's Who in America. Providence RI: Marquis Who's Who.
Who's Who in the Southeast. Providence RI: Marquis Who's Who.
Who's Who in the World. Providence RI: Marquis Who's Who.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links