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Discourses of Madness
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Discourses of Madness

A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 June 2024) | Viewed by 7972

Special Issue Editor

Prof. Dr. Mary Jo Muratore

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
University of Missouri Curators Distinguished Professor, School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA
Interests: French, European and comparative literature; contemporary critical theory and practice; textual configurations of marginalization and the poetics of desire; post-colonial literary and cultural studies; Afro-Romance and Afro-Atlantic writers

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Today I felt pass over me a breath of wind from the wings of madness.   

—Charles Baudelaire

Literary artists and textualists have long been fascinated by the alienated, the marginalized, the eccentric; intrigued, if not befuddled, by their non-conformity, their recalcitrance, their obstinate refusal to adhere; seized by their indifference to social norms and prescribed dictates; lured, if not bemused, by their fundamental apartness or uncompromising candor. In this optic, the non-clinical dimensions of madness have been extensively explored in short stories, novels, poems, dramas, comedies, treatises, exposés, essays, epistles, even in post-modern counter-narratives masquerading as autobiographical memoirs. In consequence of this critical and meta-critical abundance, it is not uncommon to discover writings by scholars of the mind, specialists in applied psychiatric theory, eager to proffer accounts of “textualized” insanity, its plethoric configurations and manifestations.

In Michel Foucault’s seminal work, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1961), and throughout literary history, madness has been inextricably linked to myth and religion, to societal practices and cultural biases.  From Viking berserkers to impassioned lovers in search of elusive soulmates, emotional excess has often served to delineate norms and to assign diagnostic terms to those who fall without prescribed, predisposed boundaries.

This Special Issue invites contributions that span chronology, culture, and genre in an (individual and collective) attempt to probe the depths of a heterogenous, yet ill-defined phenomenon that has fascinated and perplexed writers and readers since the beginning of time.  Interdisciplinary and cross-cultural, the essays to inhabit this volume will constitute a trans-temporal illumination—pathological and poetic—of discourse and madness alike.  

Notations

Contributions of 5000-12000 words are welcome (although the merits of individual submissions will take precedence over essay length).

While the publication deadline for submission to this Special Issue is 30 June 2024, articles will be published online shortly after final acceptance.

Prof. Dr. Mary Jo Muratore
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • madness
  • discourse
  • pathology
  • poetics
  • textuality
  • marginality
  • deviance
  • alienation

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Published Papers (5 papers)

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Research

15 pages, 239 KiB  
Article
“Cured, I Am Frizzled, Stale, and Small”: Jungian Individuation Realized in Robert Lowell’s Life Studies
by Todd Gannon
Humanities 2024, 13(5), 126; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13050126 - 30 Sep 2024
Viewed by 589
Abstract
Robert Lowell’s Life Studies won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1960 and is credited with initiating the confessional poetry movement, which included followers and students of Lowell such as Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. In Life Studies, Lowell channeled his [...] Read more.
Robert Lowell’s Life Studies won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1960 and is credited with initiating the confessional poetry movement, which included followers and students of Lowell such as Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. In Life Studies, Lowell channeled his 1950s experiences with bipolar disorder and mental health hospitalizations into poems such as “Man and Wife”, “Waking in the Blue”, and “Home After Three Months Away”. Lowell’s hard-won Life Studies triumph, though most recently analyzed through socioeconomic and “divine madness” lenses, can also be understood through Carl Jung’s individuation concept which posits that self-realization can be attained through the reconciliation of one’s own conscious and unconscious mental processes. This article argues that Lowell’s Life Studies poems, when examined through Jungian individuation, enabled Lowell to achieve self-realization, and paved the way for mentally ill individuals to learn how to achieve psychological wholeness through art. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Discourses of Madness)
17 pages, 300 KiB  
Article
Contrapasso, Violence, and Madness in Dante’s The Divine Comedy and Westworld
by Alexander Eliot Schmid
Humanities 2024, 13(5), 109; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13050109 - 23 Aug 2024
Viewed by 1439
Abstract
The medieval epic poem, The Divine Comedy, and Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s prestige drama, Westworld, have more in common than at first meets the eye. Both represent hellish and purgatorial geographies, both physical and psychological. And both share the view [...] Read more.
The medieval epic poem, The Divine Comedy, and Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s prestige drama, Westworld, have more in common than at first meets the eye. Both represent hellish and purgatorial geographies, both physical and psychological. And both share the view that what is regularly considered “perfect liberty”, or the liberty to indulge in any and every desire one wishes to with impunity, is in fact a form of slavery, as argued by Aristotle. Both the denizens in Dante’s Inferno and the guests in Westworld’s park, therefore, are ensnared by their own desires. This article will consider the structure of Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy and Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s hit HBO show Westworld, which I will argue takes parts of its structure consciously from Dante’s The Divine Comedy. And though at the outset, the two works of art appear dissimilar, the theologically and philosophically infused medieval Catholic-Italian poetry of Dante and the sensuous, nihilistic, and provocative story-telling of Jonathan Nolan’s recent work on the generation and expression of consciousness, ultimately what they share is similarity in structure and an agreement on the connection between activity, suffering, madness, perfection, consciousness, and freedom of the will from sin. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Discourses of Madness)
13 pages, 254 KiB  
Article
“The Horror of It Made Me Mad”: Hysterical Narration in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897)
by Ariel Fried
Humanities 2024, 13(4), 92; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13040092 - 15 Jul 2024
Viewed by 1428
Abstract
This article analyzes the hysterical narration styles of two major characters in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897) to reveal the ways late-Victorian discourses attempted (and often failed) to distance particular social anxieties from their modern origins. Attending to previous literary criticism regarding socially [...] Read more.
This article analyzes the hysterical narration styles of two major characters in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897) to reveal the ways late-Victorian discourses attempted (and often failed) to distance particular social anxieties from their modern origins. Attending to previous literary criticism regarding socially Othered groups of this period—racialized foreigners, New Women, and the urban poor—as well as (pseudo)scientific studies from the 1870s–80s, this reading notes the ways that Victorian cultural biases surrounding race, gender, and class could be projected onto Gothicized, Orientalized figures in literary texts. Pairing a postcolonial examination of the novel’s spatial and temporal elements with a psychoanalytic reading of this text, I argue that the slowing pace in Robert Holt’s narrative and the compulsive repetition of Marjorie Lindon’s both reflect the novel’s disruption of space and time and structurally parallel the symptoms of a “hallucinatory hysterical attack,” as conceived by Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud. Together, these hysterical narratives reveal the failure of particular cultural and scientific discourses to completely bury Victorian anxieties about modernity into different, explicitly Othered spaces and times by collapsing both space and time in the narration of psychic trauma. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Discourses of Madness)
14 pages, 253 KiB  
Article
The Paradox of Chivalric Madness: Ariosto’s and Cervantes’s Madness Representations’ Impact on Disability Representation
by Nicholas L. Johnson
Humanities 2024, 13(3), 87; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13030087 - 7 Jun 2024
Viewed by 878
Abstract
This study investigates the connection between madness and critiques of the chivalric romance genre in two late Renaissance works, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quijote de la Mancha. The satire of chivalric romance in these works of fiction [...] Read more.
This study investigates the connection between madness and critiques of the chivalric romance genre in two late Renaissance works, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quijote de la Mancha. The satire of chivalric romance in these works of fiction caution against nascent modes of thinking in imperial societies for the implementation of chivalric ideas to inspire and promote imperial conquests in Latin America through juxtaposition with the Muslim and Moorish conquest in the Maghreb and through metaphorical island governance. In order to make such critiques, these novels implement the madness of their parodic knights to disguise their critiques. This practice establishes a precedent which later literature can employ to make sociocultural critique covertly, to the detriment of disability representations as literary devices or metaphors. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Discourses of Madness)
14 pages, 292 KiB  
Article
Productive Psychoses: Views on Terrorism and Politics in Homeland
by Janna Houwen
Humanities 2023, 12(3), 37; https://doi.org/10.3390/h12030037 - 4 May 2023
Viewed by 1574
Abstract
In the eight seasons of Showtime’s television show Homeland, leading character Carrie suffers from a bipolar disorder which repeatedly results in psychotic episodes. During these psychotic breakdowns, her grip on reality is disturbed by delusions. However, her psychotic disposition also leads to [...] Read more.
In the eight seasons of Showtime’s television show Homeland, leading character Carrie suffers from a bipolar disorder which repeatedly results in psychotic episodes. During these psychotic breakdowns, her grip on reality is disturbed by delusions. However, her psychotic disposition also leads to abilities and insights that make her a valuable agent in international secret agencies such as the CIA. This essay examines how the productivity of Carrie’s psychoses can be related to the political, military-industrial order within which she operates as a spy fighting terrorism and other threats to national and international security. What does the fact that a person suffering from psychoses is able to comprehend complex international political processes tell us about these processes and the context in which they occur? To answer this question, I turn to two scholars, both of whom have theorized subjectivity in relation to psychosis: psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and philosopher Mauricio Lazzarato. The radically different notions of Lacan and Lazzarato lead to different interpretations of Homeland. However, although Lazzarato is a critical opponent of Lacanian psychoanalysis, I demonstrate that Lacan’s psychoanalytical ideas and Lazzarato’s machine theories can to some extent be read as complementary in an analysis of Homeland, for what the two distinct theorists have in common is that they both relate subjectivity to sign systems—to the emergence and assignment of meaning, as well as to the suspension and absence thereof. This paper argues that the psychoses of Homeland’s lead character produce political meanings because of the condition’s specific relation to meaninglessness. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Discourses of Madness)
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