« "Everyman" | Main | Long-liveth the Eve stereotype »
February 28, 2007
Getting Psyched
"The psychologist enables us to grasp certain configurations of experience analytically, categorically, and (if we accept his conceptions of health and neurosis) normatively...Fiction lets us know what it is like to be a certain kind of person with a certain kind of necessity." (222).
Paris explains the need of psychology in mimetic criticism in a way that can be well-justified because we are then able to further understand the mentality of the characters and further understand ourselves, thus enhancing our perception of reality. We need to understand how people's mind works and I do agree with Paris that sometimes the story is written to help us understand a certain feeling of a character more than anything. What a better way to do that than psychologically analyzing the character?
Posted by ErinWaite at February 28, 2007 1:32 PM