Madness Language Literature

"This remarkable volume brings together texts that reveal a unique perspective on Foucault's work on the interrelated topics of madness, language, and literature in the second half of the 1960s. Not only do these texts develop analyses and concepts that cannot be found anywhere else in Foucault's oeuvre, but they also show that Foucault's relation to structuralism in those years was far more complex and rich than he himself was ready to acknowledge. They show, more precisely, that between The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge, and specifically in relation to madness, literature, and literary criticism, Foucault turned to structuralism not only to challenge the central role attributed to the human subject, but also to analyze language and human experience as in a way detached from the historical conditions of their emergence and production. Madness, Language, Literature is organized around three main issues: the status and place of the madman in our societies; the relationship between madness, language, and literature in Baroque theater, the theater of cruelty by Antonin Artaud, and the work of Raymond Roussel; and the evolution of literary criticism in the 1960s. A study of the "absence of a work" in Balzac and of the relationship between desire and knowledge in Flaubert completes this ensemble, presenting a side of Foucault somewhat different from the one we know from the texts he published during this time"--

Newly published lectures by Foucault on madness, literature, and structuralism. Perceiving an enigmatic relationship between madness, language, and literature, French philosopher Michel Foucault developed ideas during the 1960s that are less explicit in his later, more well-known writings. Collected here, these previously unpublished texts reveal a Foucault who undertakes an analysis of language and experience detached from their historical constraints. Three issues predominate: the experience of madness across societies; madness and language in Artaud, Roussel, and Baroque theater; and structuralist literary criticism. Not only do these texts pursue concepts unique to this period such as the “extra-linguistic,” but they also reveal a far more complex relationship between structuralism and Foucault than has typically been acknowledged.

As a transformative thinker of the twentieth century, whose work spanned all branches of the humanities, Michel Foucault had a complex and profound relationship with literature. And yet this critical aspect of his thought, because it was largely expressed in speeches and interviews, remains virtually unknown to even his most loyal readers. This book brings together previously unpublished transcripts of oral presentations in which Foucault speaks at length about literature and its links to some of his principal themes: madness, language and criticism, and truth and desire. The associations between madness and language—and madness and silence—preoccupy Foucault in two 1963 radio broadcasts, presented here, in which he ranges among literary examples from Cervantes and Shakespeare to Diderot, before taking up questions about Artaud’s literary correspondence, lettres de cachet, and the materiality of language. In his lectures on the relations among language, the literary work, and literature, he discusses Joyce, Proust, Chateaubriand, Racine, and Corneille, as well as the linguist Roman Jakobson. What we know as literature, Foucault contends, begins with the Marquis de Sade, to whose writing—particularly La Nouvelle Justine and Juliette—he devotes a full two-part lecture series focusing on notions of literary self-consciousness. Following his meditations on history in the recently published Speech Begins after Death, this current volume makes clear the importance of literature to Foucault’s thought and intellectual development.

Language has always been used as a measure of social, ideological, and psychological contexts for the exploration of madness. The Madhouse of Language considers the relations between madness and language from the late seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries, focusing on the close analysis of both medical records and texts by mad writers. It presents a highly original account of the linguistic relations between madness and sanity, of the appropriation by sane writers of the forms of English, and of attempts by mad patients to gain access to the expressive potential of language.

This is the author's most influential work of literary theory and criticism in which she explores the relations between literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis.

Mental illness has been a favourite topic for authors throughout the history of literature, while psychologists and psychiatrists such as Sigmund Freud and Karl Jaspers have in turn been interested in and influenced by literature. Pioneers within philosophy, psychiatry and literature share the endeavour to explore and explain the human mind and behaviour, including what a society deems as being outside perceived normality. Using a theoretical approach that is eclectic and transdisciplinary, this volume engages with literature’s multifarious ways of probing minds and bodies in a state of mental ill health. The cases and the theory are in dialogue with a clinical approach, addressing issues and diagnoses such as trauma, psychosis, bipolar disorder, eating disorders, self-harm, hoarding disorder, PTSD and Digital Sexual Assault. The chapters in Part I address literary representations of madness with a historical awareness, outlining the socio-political potentials of madness literature. Part II investigates how representations of mental illness in literature can offer unique insights into the subjective experience of alternative states of mind. Part III reflects on how literary cases can be applied to help inform mental health education, how they can be used therapeutically and how they are giving credence to new diagnoses. Throughout the book, the contributors consider how the language and discourses of literature—both stylistically and theoretically—can teach us something new about what it means to be mentally unwell.

Originally published in 1990, Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language explores the relationship between madness and the disruption of linguistic and structural norms in Virginia Woolf’s modernist novels, opening new ground in Woolfian studies, as well as in psychoanalytic criticism. Focusing on Mrs Dalloway, The Waves, To the Lighthouse and Between the Acts, it investigates narrative strategies, showing that Woolf’s writings question their own origins and connection with madness and suicide. By combining textual analysis with an original use of autobiographical material, the books cause us to reconsider the full complexity of the articulation between an author’s life and work.

To probe the literary representation of the alienated mind, Lillian Feder examines mad protagonists of literature and the work of writers for whom madness is a vehicle of self-revelation. Ranging from ancient Greek myth and tragedy to contemporary poetry, fiction, and drama, Professor Feder shows how literary interpretations of madness, as well as madness itself, reflect the very cultural assumptions, values, and prohibitions they challenge.

In the romantic tradition, music is consistently associated with madness, either as cause or cure. Writers as diverse as Kleist, Hoffmann, and Nietzsche articulated this theme, which in fact reaches back to classical antiquity and continues to resonate in the modern imagination. What John Hamilton investigates in this study is the way literary, philosophical, and psychological treatments of music and madness challenge the limits of representation and thereby create a crisis of language. Special focus is given to the decidedly autobiographical impulse of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, where musical experience and mental disturbance disrupt the expression of referential thought, illuminating the irreducible aspects of the self before language can work them back into a discursive system. The study begins in the 1750s with Diderot's Neveu de Rameau, and situates that text in relation to Rousseau's reflections on the voice and the burgeoning discipline of musical aesthetics. Upon tracing the linkage of music and madness that courses through the work of Herder, Hegel, Wackenroder, and Kleist, Hamilton turns his attention to E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose writings of the first decades of the nineteenth century accumulate and qualify the preceding tradition. Throughout, Hamilton considers the particular representations that link music and madness, investigating the underlying motives, preconceptions, and ideological premises that facilitate the association of these two experiences. The gap between sensation and its verbal representation proved especially problematic for romantic writers concerned with the ineffability of selfhood. The author who chose to represent himself necessarily faced problems of language, which invariably compromised the uniqueness that the author wished to express. Music and madness, therefore, unworked the generalizing functions of language and marked a critical limit to linguistic capabilities. While the various conflicts among music, madness, and language questioned the viability of signification, they also raised the possibility of producing meaning beyond significance.