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Cool! I studied Butler for some time but moved on to psychoanalysis (with foci on Freud and Lacan), and I admire Kristeva's insight and critique of Lacan but it's more a theoretical invesitgation than literary analysis, so I ended up using the writing sample on Hawthorne and Freud, a more reserved choice I think. Hi! I want to study 20th modernist writers as well! Is your WS based on 20th authors?

Hi everyone. This topic is so interesting and reading other people's WS is so inspiring! My WS adopts a psychoanalytic perspective of melancholia to analyze Hawthorne's tales.What other critics identify as biblical symbols are actually psychological symptoms of melancholia. I thus argue that Hawthorne depicts Puritan sin with psychological illness and symptoms, especially with melancholia, and analyze this mechanism of contracting psychopathology in his short story with a focus on his specific use of narrator and irony. The purpose of using irony to describe a melancholic persona, I suggest, is to modify the strict Puritan teaching and provide his own literary-religious belief that there can be an alternative means, rather than eternal damnation, of salvation for sinners who have fallen into psychological illness, a literary working-through that Freud has little accounted for in his collections. Any Americanists around? So far I don't see any scholars with an interest in 19th-century or 20th Ame lit here, so I decided not to lurk anymore lol