Norman N. Holland

[1] Holland's scholarship focused largely on psychoanalytic criticism and cognitive poetics, subjects on which he wrote fifteen books and nearly 250 scholarly articles.

[3] Holland's writings have been translated into Chinese, Dutch, Persian, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish.

In the same year he accepted a position as chair of the Department of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he became McNulty Professor.

Since 1976, Holland served as a scientific associate at the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry and since 1981 had been on the advisory board of the D. W. Winnicott Library.

Besides being the Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar at the University of Florida,[6] Holland also held more than a dozen membership roles, board positions and teaching appointments.

5 Readers Reading (1975)[15] pursues this conclusion based on case studies of five university students who gave free association responses (according to psychoanalytic technique) to three short stories.

But the book extended the reader-response argument to show, based on a case study of one woman, how what one finds funny, that is, one's sense of humor, expresses one's personal identity.

During the 1970s, Holland and his colleague at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Murray Schwartz, developed a style of reader-response teaching that they named the "Delphi Seminar.

[18] The story takes place in an English department, and the reader is led through the text using reader-response theory to understand the characters and the crime.

The text elaborates a "model of mind" based on psychological concepts of feedback, and illustrates how individuals both use, and are constrained by, their bodies, their culture, and their "interpretive communities" as well as their personalities or identities.

Additionally, this text develops a three-tier feedback model of the mind, which illustrates that the brain deals with its world by hypothesizing through physiology, through fixed codes and flexible canons derived from culture, and through personal identity.

Another of Holland's projects, A Sharper Focus, is an online film resource featuring a collection of essays meant to inform and enhance the viewer experience of classic movies (see #External links below).