A psychoanalytic criticism of richard connell's 'The most dangerous game' / Kamisah Hj Ariffin

Reading involves interaction between the text and the readers. During this interaction, readers are practising literary critic, which is defined as an activity attempting to study, analyze, interpret and evaluate a work of art. There are different schools of criticism in interpreting literary texts such as Marxist critics, readers response critics and New Historicism. This paper looks at the psychoanalytic approach, which applies Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis methods of interpreting works of literature. Freud believed that a literary text is the writer's dream and fantasy, thus, it can be analyzed like a dream. This paper also attempts to apply this psychoanalytic criticism onto 'The Most Dangerous Game' written by Richard Connell to uncover the real meaning of the text.