Madness and Civilization in Literature and Film
Course Description
This course seeks to examine the representation of mental illness in literary works and films from the nineteenth and twentieth century. The main purpose of this interdisciplinary course is to understand mental illness in its broad social and cultural contexts. We will question how Western culture has experienced, addressed and tried to redress madness as we look at the historical changes in the depiction of doctors and the medical profession, mental patients, and mental institutions by writers of fiction and filmmakers. The discussion will center upon cultural anxieties about deformity, anomaly and aberration resulting in a discourse of fear. This in turn will prompt questions about gender (e.g., female hysteria and the male doctor) and class, about power, authority and control, about definitions of “normal” behavior and social happiness, and about the integrity and disintegration of the self and the body.
Course readings:
Bram Stoker, Dracula
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Sarah Waters, Fingersmith
Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization
Other assorted readings will be made available in due course. The following films will be shown in class:
Das Kabinet des dr. Caligari , dir. Robert Wiene
Spellbound, dir. Alfred Hitchcock
The Haunting , dir. Robet Wise
Syllabus
4 Oct. William Cowper, “Lines Written During a Period of Insanity”; Robert Southey, “The Idiot”; Wordsworth, “The Idiot Boy”, P.B. Shelley, “Julian and Maddalo” (1818); John Keats, “Ode on Melancholy” (1819); John Clare, “Love of Liberty” and “I Am”. Michel Foucault, “The Great Confinement”
11 Oct.
Gothic Madness I: The Child Brain
Bram Stoker, Dracula
18 Oct.
Gothic Madness I: The Child Brain, cont'd
Bram Stoker, Dracula ; fragments from film versions
25 Oct.
Gothic Madness II: A Trap for the Unwary
Henry James, Turn of the Screw (1898)
Anthony Vidler, “Unhomely Houses”
8 Nov.
Gothic Madness III: The Mad Scientist
Das Kabinet des Dr. Caligari, dir. Robert Wiene (1919, 60 mins.)
15 Nov.
Madness and Modernity I: A Sense of Proportion
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
22 Nov.
Madness and Modernity I: A Sense of Proportion, con'td
Virginia Woolf , Mrs. Dalloway (1925); “On Being Ill” (1926/1930)
Foucault, "Doctors and Patients"
PAPER PROPOSAL DUE
29 Nov.
Women's Bodies I: Depression, Hysteria and Confinement
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”
Sigmund Freud, “Dora”, “The Schreber Case”
Foucault, "The Great Fear"
6 Dec.
Madness and Civilization: Depression and Hysteria
Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)
13 Dec.
Amnesia, Surrealism, and the Psychological Thriller
Spellbound, dir. Alfred Hitchcock (1945)
20 Dec.
Madness and Modernity II: The Psychiatric Institution
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963)
10 Jan.
Women's Bodies II: Another Trap for the Unwary
The Haunting, dir. Robert Wise (1963, 107 mins.)
17 Jan.
The Great Confinement
Sarah Waters, Fingersmith (2002)
Assignments
Proposal: 300 words
A succinct formulation of a research question and thesis statement, outlining the scope of your argument, its place within the wider remit of the course and/or scholarship in the field, and the aims and objectives you will try to achieve. Please attach a short reading list of texts and works you propose to use.
Due date: 22 November
Paper: 3000 words
You are expected to write a compare/contrast paper on a topic of your choice, using two literary works, or a literary work and a film, preferably from a different period, at least one of must be taken from the course reading list. In addition, you will draw into your discussion one other “text”, which may be a theoretical essay, a work of art, an institution, or any other object, text or artefact, but not a literary work or film; this “text” must come from any region of the English-speaking world (unless you have a compelling reason not to do so).
Your paper will present a well-conceived, well-constructed, well-written argument; a proper thesis statement is thus absolutely essential. Its formatting must follow any of the standard humanities style sheets used in Anglo-American scholarship (MLA, Chicago, MHRA). Explanatory footnotes must be kept to an absolute minimum. The list of works cited does not count towards the final word limit of the assignment.
Due date: 17 January 2005.
Links
Literature, Arts and Medicine Database
(If you have any other interesting links or items for the bibliography that can be added here, please do not hesitate to forward them to me.)
Bibliography
Porter, Roy. Madness: A Brief History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Rothman, David J., Steven Marcus and Stephanie A. Kiceluk, eds. Medicine and Western Civilization. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995.
Valentine, Kylie. Psychoanalysis, Psychiatry, and Modernist Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Pages updated: 14 October 2004, Dr Wim Van Mierlo