BASIC CONCEPTS

— When novelists claim they do not invent it, but hear voices and find stories in their head, they are neither joking nor crazy.

— When characters, narrators, or muses have minds of their own and occasionally take over, they are alternate personalities.

— Alternate personalities and memory gaps, but no significant distress or dysfunction, is a normal version of multiple personality.

— normal Multiple Personality Trait (MPT) (core of Multiple Identity Literary Theory), not clinical Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)

— The normal version of multiple personality is an asset in fiction writing when some alternate personalities are storytellers.

— Multiple personality originates when imaginative children with normal brains have unassuaged trauma as victim or witness.

— Psychiatrists, whose standard mental status exam fails to ask about memory gaps, think they never see multiple personality.

— They need the clue of memory gaps, because alternate personalities don’t acknowledge their presence until their cover is blown.

— In novels, most multiple personality, per se, is unnoticed, unintentional, and reflects the author’s view of ordinary psychology.

— Multiple personality means one person who has more than one identity and memory bank, not psychosis or possession.

— Euphemisms for alternate personalities include parts, pseudonyms, alter egos, doubles, double consciousness, voice or voices.

— Multiple personality trait: 90% of fiction writers; possibly 30% of public.

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Sunday, January 12, 2020


“The Academic Apocalypse” by Ross Douthat: New York Times columnist feels existential dread, because study of literature is in midst of collapse

“This column tries to keep its cool, but last week I briefly surrendered to crisis and existential dread…How did I enter this apocalyptic mood?…by downloading a package of essays from The Chronicle of Higher Education…

“The package’s title is a single word, ‘Endgame,’ and its opening text reads like the crawl for a disaster movie. ‘The academic study of literature is no longer on the verge of field collapse. It’s in the midst of it.’ Jobs are disappearing, subfields are evaporating, enrollment has tanked, and…the custodians of humanism are ‘befuddled and without purpose.’ ”


Multiple Identity Literary Theory could invigorate the academic study of literature, if it is not too late.

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