Dowling College ASC 4189C -- Culture of Madness (Honors Senior Seminar)

Professors Joshua Gidding (English) and Christian Perring (Philosophy)

Monday, 5:30-8:10PM, Spring 2004. Room RC 419

Joshua Gidding, Ph.D.

Office: 315 FH

Office Phone: (631) 244-3084

Office Hours:

Email: giddingj@dowling.edu

Christian Perring, Ph.D.

Office: 330B RC

Office Phone: (631) 244-3349

Office Hours: MTW 4:00-5:30 PM

Email: perringc@dowling.edu (please put “ASC4189” in the subject line of your email, and make sure your message contains your first and last names)

Course Description:

This is an interdisciplinary, team-taught class in the cultural representations of madness. We will be studying works of literature, philosophy, history, art and psychology that deal with -- and portray -- extreme, bizarre, and interesting/unusual mental states that, for one reason or another, have historically been deemed “mad” or “insane”, according to socio-cultural norms. The goal of the course is to better understand not only these mental states and their artistic and cultural representations, but also the social and historical conditions that influenced their artistic and discursive production.

Course structure and requirements:

The course will contain some lecturing from the instructors, but will be driven largely by student input and discussion. To this end, class discussion during the literature component of the course (weeks 4-9) – and perhaps in other weeks as well -- will be led by student discussion leaders, who will set the agenda for class discussion every week. A sign-up form for discussion leaders will be circulated at the first class meeting. The idea here is that the student discussion leaders will essentially be teaching the class (at least during the literature segment), with direction and assistance by the instructors.

Over the course of the semester there will also be two (2) scheduled, individual, half-hour tutorials between each student and one (or both) instructors, to go over and discuss your written reflection pieces (see below). You will have the option of rewriting, for full credit, any (or all) of your reflection pieces, if you wish.

Students are expected to complete all of the assigned reading before the class for which it is assigned, and to participate actively in class discussion. Discussion leaders are expected to prepare a full agenda for each class they are leading, and to hand in this agenda at the time of the class. This agenda, which will be based on (but not necessarily limited to) the assigned reading, may take the form of a very short (1-2 pp.) response paper, detailed notes or comments, or focused questions on the reading, or issues related to the reading. Since each student-led class will be led by two students, the agendas may be either individual or collaborative.

There will be a class excursion at one point during the semester, probably to Creedmore Psychiatric Institute to see outsider art.

Grading:

There will be four components to the evaluation of students:

1. Students will write six 600-word reflection pieces on their responses to the topics we cover. (~30%).

2. Student presentations. (~20%)

3. Attendance and class participation (~10%)

4. Term paper (15-20 pages) (~40%)

Required Texts:

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven & Hell

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From Underground

Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

Roy Porter, Madness: A Brief History

Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde

various photocopied handouts (will be provided by instructors)

Class Schedule

(Please note that the required readings below, while indicative of the content of the course, are not written in stone [though they are printed on paper], and are subject to change as the needs of the class become apparent. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t buy all the required texts; you absolutely should, and at the beginning of the semester [before the bookstore sends back any unbought copies]. What it does mean is that some of the specific reading assignments, both in the assigned books and the xerox handouts, may be slightly modified if necessary. But you will always be informed of this in advance. The intent is not to give you more work or make your life more difficult, but to reserve the option to fine-tune the readings if this seems appropriate.)

Weeks 1-3: 2/2, 2/9 & 2/23. We ground the course with two weeks discussing the history of madness. We will use the work of Roy Porter, who presents an open minded and culturally literate approach. We establish the link between madness and culture. We will examine the representation of madness and melancholy in art and the connection with theories of mental illness. Fundamental to this approach are the assumptions that historically important theories of madness help to explain the representation of madness, and that those theories are conceptually permeated by wider cultural assumptions, so that culture and science are complexly intertwined. Furthermore, this course will make the argument, starting in the initial weeks of the semester, that while our current discourse concerning mental illness takes a scientific reductionist stance, our social, personal and even medical attitudes and practices concerning madness and melancholy are only comprehensible by reference to the history of thought about madness.

Readings:

Roy Porter Madness: A Brief History

from Radden, The Nature of Melancholy:

Ficino, "Learned People and Melancholy," pp. 87-94

Weyer, "Melancholia, Witches, and Deceiving Demons," pp. 95-106

Teresa of Avila, "Melancholy Nuns," pp. 107-118

Burton, "Melancholic States," pp. 129-156

Week 4: 3/1. Poetry, Prophecy and Madness. This session will examine the relationship between poetry, prophecy and madness, including the relationship between visions and psychosis, and the different (and perhaps similar) roles of the poet, prophet, visionary, and psychotic.

Readings:

Ezekiel (Chaps. 1-10, 21-24, 32-39) (xerox)

Blake, The Marriage of Heaven & Hell.

Week 5: 3/8: The Madness of the Passions. In this session we will explore the relationship between extreme emotions, deviant mental conditions, and madness, including anxiety, lovesickness, bereavement, retardation, and addiction.

Readings:

Wordsworth, “The Thorn”, “The Mad Mother”, “The Idiot Boy”, “Resolution and Independence”.

Coleridge, “Kubla Khan”, “Dejection: An Ode”,

“The Pains of Sleep” (all xerox).

Week 6: 3/15. Chock Full O’ Nuts: Byron, Shelley, Browning & Swinburne. This session offers a fun-filled grab-bag of symptoms to suit all tastes, from the lovelorn to the homicidally jealous, including also the psychotically depressed and the necrophiliac. Enjoy!

Readings:

Shelley, “Julian and Maddalo”.

Browning, “My Last Duchess” and “Porphyria’s Lover”. Swinburne, “The Leper” (all xerox).

Week 7: 3/22. Me, Myself and I. The occurrence of a “split personality”, often confused with “schizophrenia” in the popular imagination, is actually a trauma-related disorder now known as “Dissociative Identity Disorder”. But whatever you call it, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde is probably still the most famous representation of this disorder in literature. While half of you might side with the good doctor, the other half may sympathize with his alter ego, the redoubtable Mr. Hyde. (Your two instructors are still split on the issue.)

Reading:

Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: pp. xi-xv, 7-62, 77-104, 124-180.

Weeks 8 (3/29) and 9 (4/12): Prophecy, Philosophy & Madness. Often included in courses on Existentialism, the novelist Dostoyevsky and the philosopher Nietzsche are also considered by some to be prophets of the “modern condition” – especially of psychological and social alienation, anti-liberalism, and fascism. Thematically they have much in common, and they also both suffered greatly from both physical and mental illnesses: Dostoyevsky from epilepsy and compulsive gambling, and Nietzsche from eye and nervous disorders and, at the end of his life, dementia. His autobiographical Ecce Homo was completed just before his final psychotic break – though some would say the book already shows signs of madness. What do you think?

Readings:

3/29: Notes From Underground: pp. 1-91, 95-101, 104-122, 126-129, 148-152.

4/12: excerpts from Ecce Homo: pp. 201-269, 326-344.

Week 10: 4/19. We will examine two areas in this class. A brief discussion of the portrayal of madness in rock music. No readings assigned. Then a longer discussion of confessional poets and memoirs.

Music:

1. Robert Johnson: Hellhound on My Trail

2. Velvet Underground: Heroin.

3. Joy Division: New Dawn Fades

4. Joy Division: She's Lost Control

5. Jesus and Mary Chain: Upside Down

6. Nirvana: Lithium

7. My Bloody Valentine: To Here Knows When

8. Throwing Muses: Delicate Cutters

9. Autechre: Track 2 from EP7

10. Nine Inch Nails: Help Me I'm in Hell (Directed by Eric Goode and Serge Becker) from Closure Pt II (19:00) (2.5 minutes)

11. Nine Inch Nails: Hurt (Directed by Simon Maxwell): from Closure Pt II (39:30)

12. Aphex Twin: Come to Daddy (Directed by Chris Cunningham)

Readings:

Anne Sexton: "Her Kind," "Noon Walk on the Asylum Lawn," and "Lullaby"

Sylvia Path: "Burning the Letters," "Daddy," "The Jailer," "Aerial," and "Lady Lazarus"

Ann Beattie, "Melancholy and the Muse," William Styron, from Darkness Visible, and Joshua Wolf Shenk, "A Melancholy of My Own," all from Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression, edited by Nell Casey (New York: William Morrow, 2001).

Week 11: 4/26. Madness in painting. We will examine the portrayal of madness in painting and the visual arts, including outsider art. Guest professor: Stephen Lamia (to be confirmed).

Reading:

Sander L. Gilman. "The Mad as Artists" from Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Madness and Race. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985)

Week 12: 5/3. Madness, modernism in art, and postmodernist theory. We will investigate the notion of the fragmentation of the subject that has played a major role in literary theory and postmodernism, and in particular we will examine the suggestions of Louis Sass that the symptoms of schizophrenia can interpreted along with modernist art as a hyperreflexivity of consciousness.

Reading:

Louis A. Sass, Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought. (New York: Basic Books, 1992). Introduction and Chapter 7: Loss of Self

Week 13: 5/10. We examine the history iconography of the asylum, which has been particularly powerful in film. We will watch One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest, and compare it with other films and novels from recent decades such as Girl, Interrupted that also focus on mental hospitals and psychiatric wards.

Reading:

Glen O. Gabbard and Krin Gabbard, "Typology, Mythology, and Ideology," and "The Fall From Grace," Chapters 1 & 4 of Psychiatry and the Cinema, Second Edition. (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press, 1999).

Jonathan Metzl, “The Gendered Psychodynamics of Pharmaceutical Advertising, 1964-97”, Journal of Medical Humanities (vol 24, no 1, 2003)

RESOURCES

Philosophy, Psychology, History, Anthropology, and Sociology of Madness and Melancholy.

· A. Alvarez. The Savage God: A Study of Suicide. WW Norton, 1990.

· Anne Llewellyn Barstow Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts.

· Joan Jacobs Brumberg. Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.

· Carlos Castaneda. Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. Pocket Books, 1985.

· Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly. Yale University Press, 1979.

· Michel Foucault: Madness and Civilization London: Tavistock, 1967.

· Sigmund Freud. The Ego and the Id. WW Norton, 1990.

· Glen O. Gabbard. ,Psychiatry and the Cinema, Second Edition, American Psychiatric Press, 1999.

· Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale University Press, 2000.

· Lynn Gamwell and Nancy Tomes. Madness in America: Cultural and Medical Perceptions of Mental Illness Before 1914. Cornell University Press, 1995.

· Sander L. Gilman. Seeing the Insane. University of Nebraska Press, 1982

· Sander L. Gilman. Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness. Cornell University Press, 1985.

· Sander L. Gilman. Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS. Cornell University Press, 1988.

· Sander Gilman (editor). Hysteria beyond Freud. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

· Ian Hacking. Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

· David Healy. Images of Trauma: From Hysteria to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. London: Faber and Faber, 1993.

· David Healy. The Antidepressant Era. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.

· Mary Ann Jimenez. Changing Faces of Madness: Early American Attitudes and the Treatment of the Insane. Brandeis University Press, 1987.

· David A. Karp. Speaking of Sadness: Depression, Disconnection, and the Meanings of Illness. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

· Kay Redfield Jamison. Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. New York, Oxford University Press, 1990.

· R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience, Random House, 1983.

· R.D. Laing, The Divided Self. Viking, 1991.

· R.D. Laing and Aaron Esterson, Sanity, Madness, and the Family, Penguin, 1964.

· William F. Lynch, Images of Hope: Imagination as Healer of the Hopeless (U. of Notre Dame P., 1974)

· Emily Martin. “The Rationality of Mania.” In Doing Science & Culture: How Cultural and Interdisciplinary Studies Are Changing The Way We Look At Science and Medicine, edited by Roddey Reid and Sharon Traweek. New York: Routledge, 2000.

· Jonathan M. Metzl. “Prozac and the Pharmacokinetics of Narrative Form.” Signs, 2001, vol 27, no.2. pp. 347-380.

· Juliet Mitchell. Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A Radical Reassessment of Freudian Psychoanalysis. Basic Books 2000.

· David B. Morris. Illness and Culture In the Postmodern Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

· Friedrich Nietzsche. Selections from Thus Spake Zarathustra and/or Ecce Homo.

· Joel Pfister and Nancy Schnog. Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.

· Sadie Plant. Writing on Drugs. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1999.

· Jennifer Radden (Editor). The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

· Jean Jacques Rousseau. Reveries of the Solitary Walker. Translated by Peter France. Penguin USA, 1980.

· Jean Jacques Rousseau. Confessions. Translated by Angela Scholar. Oxford University Press, 2000.

· Louis A. Sass. Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought. New York: Basic Books, 1992.

· Andrew Scull (editor). Madhouses, Mad-Doctors, and Madmen: The Social History of Psychiatry in the Victorian Age. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981.

· Andrew Scull. Social Order/Mental Disorder: Anglo-American Psychiatry in Historical Perspective. University of California Press, 1989.

· Edward Shorter. From Paralysis to Fatigue. New York: Free Press, 1992.

· Elaine Showalter. The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980.

· Mickey C. Smith. A Social History of the Minor Tranquilizers: The Quest for Small Comfort in the Age of Anxiety. New York: Haworth Press, 1985.

Memoirs and Case Studies.

· Ted Curtis et al. Mad Pride: A Celebration of Mad Culture. Spare Change Books, 2000.

· Meri Nana-Ama Danquah. Willow Weep for Me: A Black Woman's Journey Through Depression. Ballantine, 1999.

· Joanne Greenberg. I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. New American Library, 1984.

· Kay Redfield Jamison. An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness. Random House, 1997.

· Suzanna Kaysen. Girl, Interrupted. Vintage Books, 1994.

· Robert Mitchell Lindner, The Fifty Minute Hour: A Collection of True Psychoanalytic Tales. Other Press, 1999.

· Kate Millett. The Loony-Bin Trip. University of Illinois Press, 2000

· Jay Neugeboren, Imagining Robert: My Brother, Madness and Survival: A Memoir (Henry Holt, 1998)

· Oliver W. Sacks. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales. Summit Books, 1985.

· Lori Schiller, The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness (Warner Books, 1996)

· Marguerite Sechehaye, Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl. New American Library, 1985.

· Susan Sheehan, Is There No Place on Earth for Me? Random House, 1983.

· Lauren Slater. Prozac Diary. Penguin USA, 1999.

· William Styron. Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness. Vintage, 1992.

· Mark Vonnegut, Eden Express (Bantam, 1976)

· Alan Wheelis, How People Change (HarperCollins, 1985)

· Irwin Yalom, Every Day Gets a Little Closer: A Twice-Told Therapy (Basic Books, 1990)

Literature.

· Bellow, Saul. Herzog (Penguin, 1996)

· ______ Humboldt’s Gift (Penguin, 1996)

· Blake, William. The Poetry and Prose of William Blake (ed. Erdman, Doubleday, 1970)

· Persinmmon Blackbridge. Prozac Highway: A Novel. Press Gang Publishers, 1997.

· Kate Braverman. Lithium for Medea : A Novel. Penuin, 1989.

· Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights (Norton, 1990)

· Byron, A Critical Edition of the Major Works (ed. J. J. McGann, The Oxford Authors Series, 1986)

· Chekhov. Ward 6

· Coleridge (ed. H.J. Jackson, The Oxford Authors Series, 1985)

· Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness (Norton, 1988)

· De Quincey, Thomas. Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Oxford, 1985.

· Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (trans. Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky. Vintage, 1991.

· ___________ Crime & Punishment (Norton, 1975)

· ___________ The Idiot (trans. Myers, Oxford, 1992)

· Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up (New Directions, 1983)

· __________ Tender Is the Night (Simon & Schuster, 1995)

· Janet Frame. Faces in the Water.

· Nicholas Gogol, Memoirs of a Madman. (Short story, in The Mantle and Other Stories) (Also known as Diary of a Madman, or The Madman's Diary).

· Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf. Henry Holt, 1980.

· James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (Oxford, 1986)

· Franz Kafka. Metamorphosis, The Castle

· Ken Kesey. One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest. Viking, 2002.

· Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (Vintage, 1998)

· _____ The Last Gentleman (Picador, 1999)

· _____ The Second Coming (Picador, 1999)

· _____ Lancelot, Picador, 1999,

· _____ The Thanatos Syndrome, Picador, 1999.

· Sylvia Plath. The Bell Jar. Harper Perennial, 2000.

· Anne Sexton. A Self-Portrait in Letters. Edited by Linda Gray Sexton, Lois Ames. Houghton Mifflin, 1992.

· Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, New American Library, 1994.

· Mary Shelley. Frankenstein. Signet, 2000.

· Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry & Prose (ed. Reiman, Norton, 1977)

· Lionel Trilling. Of This Time, of That Place, and Other Stories. Harcourt, 1980.

Films.

· A Fine Madness, directed by Irvin Kershner, 1966.

· Altered States, directed by Ken Russell, 1980.

· Awakenings, directed by Penny Marshall, 1990.

· As Good As It Gets, directed by James L. Brooks, 1997.

· Benny & Joon, directed by Jeremiah Chechik, 1993.

· A Beautiful Mind, directed by Ron Howard, 2001.

· Birdy, directed by Alan Parker, 1984.

· Breaking the Waves, directed by Lars von Trier, 1996.

· Color of Night, directed by Richard Rush, 1994.

· The Caveman's Valentine, directed by Kasi Lemmons, 2001.

· The Celluloid Closet, directed by Jeffrey Friedman, Robert Epstein, 1996.

· Dressed to Kill, directed by Brian De Palma, 1980.

· Family Life, directed by Ken Loach, 1971.

· Fight Club, directed by David Fincher, 1999.

· Final Analysis, directed by Phil Joanou, 1992.

· A Fine Madness, directed by Irvin Kershner, 1966.