Advanced seminar: Anglistik Literaturwissenschaft: Themen, Motive, Autoren der Englischsprachigen Literatur I und II; Themen, Genres, Epochen der amerikanischen Literatur
Subtitle
“Why Will You Say That I am Mad”: Fictions of Insanity in 19th and 20th Century US America
“Why will you say that I am mad,” asks the unnamed narrator the reader at the opening of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843). The narrative about a madman who, addressing the reader, defends his sanity after having murdered an old man marks the beginning of an unbroken fascination with “madness” or “abnormal behavior” in American literature and art. In this course we will explore the broad spectrum of literary and visual representations of madness from the early 19th to the 20th/21st century. Our starting point will be the theoretical approaches by Michel Foucault (Madness and Civilization) and Shoshana Felman (“Madness and the Literary”) who have shown that concepts like “madness” and its counterpart “sanity” or “reason” are social constructions made by a particular society at a given time. We will then move on to depictions of mad, or insane, behavior in Gothic writing (especially in Poe’s work) and investigate an unreliable narrator’s descent into madness in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1894). 20th century literary texts on insanity to be examined in class include Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) and Sylvia Plath’s autobiographical The Bell Jar (1963), just to name a few. As to visual treatments of the topic, we will discuss Alfred Hitchcock’s film noir Spellbound (1945), Anatole Litvak’s The Snake Pit (1948), and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (dir. Miloš Forman, 1975) as well as diverse representations of the “Joker” in the Batman Series (especially Bob Hall’s graphic novel Batman: I, Joker, 1998, and Heath Ledger’s performance in The Dark Knight, dir. Christopher Nolan, 2008). Some of our guiding questions will be: “What is ‘madness’ and what function does it have in the prose and visual narratives?”; “What is the relationship between the ‘mad’ protagonist and the reader?”; and “Why is modern and postmodern Hollywood so obsessed with “strange” or “deviant” behavior?”
Required texts:
• Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Penguin Classics).
• A reader with primary and secondary texts will be made available at the beginning of the course.
