COM LIT 183Literature and Madness

What separates rationality from madness? Who determines who is sane and who is mad? How does literary representation impact our understanding of sanity and insanity, and how does literature interact with medical approaches to mental health? Exploration of these questions with a transcultural approach to literary texts that addresses madness as an ancient phenomenon, and with contemporary approaches to psychology, disability, and mental health. Examination of questions on the medical categorizing of mental illnesses across time; the ethics of representing madness in literature; the relationship between madness, creativity, and resistance; and the interplay between institutionalized and noninstitutionalized forms of care. Primary sources range from Senecan tragedy; to the One Thousand and One Nights and holy fools in medieval Islam; to women’s complex relationship with the diagnosis of hysteria; to romance heroes and Romanticism; to anticolonial responses to psychoanalysis.

P/NP or letter grading.