204331 © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi �0.��63/978900436�376_009 Chapter 7 “Those Masterful Images”: Teaching Modernism with “New” Close Reading and C.G. Jung’s Red Book Susan Rowland Those masterful images because complete Grew in pure mind, but out of what began? w.b. yeats, “The Circus Animals Desertion”1 ⸪ “Masterful images” are arguably an artistic problem for more artists and authors than just W.B. Yeats. Modernist writers grappled with cultural and aesthetic fragmentation accelerated by war. I suggest that Yeats’s late re-orientation to his mythopoetic symbols is emblematic of modernism’s problem with the modern self, equally and pertinently addressed by C.G. Jung’s struggle not to be mastered by such images. For both Yeats and Jung it is only by finding a vi- able and dialogical relationship with powerful symbols that their potential to strip the psyche of humanity can be assuaged. Here is indeed an opportunity to “make it new,” in enabling students to engage in close reading as their own psychodrama, an adventure in literary (re)making of themselves. This chapter uses the term “close reading” in the aim of getting beyond the exclusively and exclusionary textual practice enshrined in New Criticism of the first part of the last century. While contemporary to modernism and including some of its epistemological anxieties, New Criticism responded by narrowing the focus of critical practice in the cause of defining the liter- ary work as discrete object. Literary texts absolutely devoid of meaningful context were supposed to allow the mimicking of methodology of classical science in which a wholly separate subject, or reader, gazes without partici- pating in, a wholly invulnerable object, or work of literature. W.B. Yeats and C.G. Jung were no such adherents of texts without the reading psyche. Later 1 W.B. Yeats, “The Circus Animals Desertion,” in Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1933/1979), pp. 391–392, p. 392. 0003943166.INDD 155 5/25/2018 3:22:33 AM