| dc.description.abstract | This thesis explores the relationship between literature and psychology. It explores how literature has the capacity to describe different aspects of the psychological phenomenon known as “the hook”. In short, the hook is “a nervous, romanticising, compulsive fixation on another person with strong elements of panic and addiction” (Gran 287). Based on close readings of Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick and William Corlett’s Now and Then, I argue that fiction can be more nuanced than general psychological theories, and therefore an asset to the psychological field. I also claim that the field of literature can gain in the use of theory from psychology to investigate what happens in novels. I begin by presenting Sissel Gran’s definition of the hook from 2010 and explaining how it differs from other types of unrequited love. Then I give an analysis of the hooks the characters of I Love Dick and Now and Then are trapped in, demonstrating how the form of the novels makes the hook appear. I look at how literary techniques, such as story versus text, point of view, the narrator, reliability, delay and characterisation have been used in I Love Dick and Now and Then, and what their effects are on the presentation of the character’s one-sided, obsessive and ultimately unrequited love. Further, I compare and contrast the two hooks. The hook in I Love Dick shows a spontaneous hook, as Chris K gets hooked on a friend of her husband after only one meeting and one phone call. It also shows how attachment history can play a part in creating a hook and how writing can be used to overcome it. The hook in Now and Then contributes to the field of psychology by exploring how a hook can last as long as Chris M’s does, by showing an example of a homosexual hook, by showing a way of getting off the hook and by exploring how a character can be predisposed to get a hook and uses it to shape his adult life. | eng |