Description

The fool, the idiot savant, the megalomaniac, the brooding, tortured romantic, the madwoman in the attic. These are stock characters in literature, alternately racked with crippling doubt and despair and privy to extraordinary flashes of insight. Hamlet is driven to distraction but he also rebels against a crazy world in which “time is out of joint.”

“O the mind, mind has mountains,” wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins, “cliffs of fall/Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.” Many of our greatest poets have wrestled with the darkness we today call mental illness. In this course, we’ll study works in which a variety of writers take us to the edge of that abyss. We’ll also consider the ways that notions of madness are socially constructed, historically contingent, speak to a range of contemporary concerns, and often serve to define the boundaries of acceptable discourse and behavior. Finally, we’ll examine a variety of literary and filmic strategies for depicting disturbed (and disturbing) states of consciousness and for dramatizing the dangers as well as the opportunities they present to individuals and social structures.

Texts (in the order we’ll read them)

Julie Otsuka, “Diem Perdidi,” in Granta 117 (Autumn 2011) (handout)

Robert Louis Stevenson. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. New York: Signet Classics (reissue), 2012.

Charlotte Perkins Stetson [Gilman], “The Yellow Wallpaper,” in The New England Magazine 11:5 (January 1892) (handout)

Jean Giradoux, The Madwoman of Chaillot, adapted by Maurice Valency. New York: Dramatist’s Play Service, 1998.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Burton Raffel, ed. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2003.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From Underground, trans. Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Vintage, 1994.

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, New York: Harper Perennial, 2006.

Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping, New York: Picador, 2004.

Diana Hacker, A Pocket Style Manual, 5^th ed., Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009.