ABSTRACT
Remembering Dionysus argues that academic disciplines such as psychology and literature can be understood as parts of what has been severed in Dionysian dismemberment. Such a revision will facilitate their and our renewal via participation in zoe, or endless instinctual life. Psychology and literary studies re-form each other to show active imagination and close reading as acts of Dionysian magic for the twenty-first century. Active imagination becomes soulful magic, soul-fulfilling magic, while converting close reading to Dionysian reading. For centuries, literary scholarship meant the examination of classical texts and their languages. Through disciplinary negotiations and formation, New Criticism and Jungian psychology divided the heritage of literary and philosophical Romanticism. Both the psychology of the unconscious and literary studies began in previously neglected wild writing and set about disciplining it as quickly as possible. Post-New Critical close reading is free to expand the hermeneutic circle of interpretation beyond the text into the psychic dimension of the text's symbols.
