THE SCHISMATIC WANTED(A) TO MAKE ISLAM A WORLD RELIGION(B) TO CHOO...

10. The Schismatic wanted

(A) to make Islam a world religion

(B) to choose the caliphs themselves

(C) to let Ali take Mohammed’s place as leader

(D) to divide Muslims into various sects

Reading 2:

Sigmund Freud was not a literary theorist. However, he did contribute to critical theory

through both his theories and his use of art to show that the application of psychology can

extend to the highest forms of cultures. Freud was always interested in literature, and he drew

some of the best illustrations of his theories from classic poems and plays.

Freud saw the unconscious as the impetus of both cultural and psychic activity. Therefore,

the same principles operated in both, and that the same mechanisms – such as displacement and

symbolization – applied. While Freud was not the first to note the importance of the

unconscious mind, he was the first to attempt a coherent theory of its operation and function.

He argued that the unconscious operates according to universal law, and is crucial to all aspects

of mental life that involve fantasy, or diversion from reality. From this point of view, it is

natural to apply Freudian principles to imaginative literature. Writers transform individual,

unconscious fantasy into universal art - a kind of formal fantasy halfway between a reality that

denies wishes and a world of imagination in which every wish is granted.

In focusing on the unconscious origins for literature, Freud was in a sense reviving the

traditional idea of divine inspiration. [1] Philosophers and art theorists have often turned to

such a theory of the imagination to explain multiple meanings, repetition, and any apparent

disorder in art. Similarly, psychoanalysis uses the theory of the unconscious to explain

examples of “disorder’ in consciousness, such as dreams.

[2] This analogy allowed Freud to suggest that fantasies called art could be interpreted in

the same way as dreams. Writers, as Freud noted, have always seen great significance in

dreams. In his view, portrayals of dreams in works of literature supported his own theories

about their structures, mechanisms, and interpretation. For example, the mechanisms of

displacement and symbolization obviously resemble the literary devices of metaphor and

symbolism.[3]

Critics of Freud have objected that the non-logical processes of the unconscious do not

resemble the conscious effort that results in work of literature. Freud would reply that while

conscious thought is necessary to produce works of art, the creative sources of art remain in the

conscious. In this view, conscious activity merely obscures what is truly important in art. What

interested Freud were the deep unconscious structures literature shares with myth and religion,

as well as with dreams. The apparent individuality of literature was not as significant as its

ultimate universality. [4]