Norman Holland, the Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar in English, has, over a long career, explored how the human mind relates to literature. In the course of this inquiry, he has written twelve books and over two hundred articles in popular and professional magazines in America and abroad. He has lectured all over the world, not only in such familiar places as London, Paris, Rome, or Berlin, but in Sapporo, Benares, and even Katmandu. Writings of his have been translated into Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Magyar, Russian, and Spanish.
Professor Holland has held Guggenheim and A.C.L.S. Fellowships. He is best known for his books concentrating psychoanalytic and cognitive psychology on literary questions: Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare (1966); The Dynamics of Literary Response (1968); Poems in Persons (1973); 5 Readers Reading (1975); Laughing (1982); The I (1985); The Brain of Robert Frost(1988); Holland’s Guide to Psychoanalytic Psychology and Literature-and-Psychology (1990); and The Critical I (1992), an interrogation of contemporary literary theory through what we think we know about the way our minds work. Death in a Delphi Seminar (1995) is a postmodern mystery set in a reader-response seminar. Professor Holland’s most recent book is Know Thyself: Delphi Seminars (with Murray M. Schwartz), developing a widely applicable teaching method based on students’ insights into their own writings and personalities.
Professor Holland retired in August 2008. Currently, he moderates the online discussion group PSYART and edits the online journal PSYART: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychology of the Arts. In his current writings, he combines cognitive science with psychoanalytic psychology to arrive at new models of reading and aesthetic response.