Reading & Composition

This course focuses on the aesthetics of madness and melancholia in literature and film. After situating these twin “pathologies” in medical and psychiatric history, we will begin to ask how empirical perspectives square with their treatment by literary and filmic texts. Throughout the course, we will explore both madness and melancholia as psychic and affective states; as modes of aesthetic production and experience; and as forms of social dissent and disruption– in short, as categories for our analysis as literary critics.

As a class, we will ask questions like: What is a “sad girl theory” and how does it involve a feminized aesthetics of depression? What does “feeling bad” mean for queers and within the history of queer sexuality? How has madness figured in colonial racism– and what are the intersections between colonial expansion and psychiatric medicine? What makes us narrate the experience of love as ecstatic or crazy—and what does it mean for Beyoncé to sing about it in the 21st century? Why must our “pathologies” demand their cures? And why do literature and film care?

In order to approach these questions (and others), we will examine emblematic texts in psychiatry and medical science as well as their social critiques in ethnographic writings, reading these against the fictional imaginaries that speak nearby, against or with them. Rather than offering readymade answers, we will work to implement literary analysis in order to fathom how texts produce meaning: how they affirm, resituate, or reinvent our understandings of madness and melancholia. As writers, you will be encouraged to test and revise claims in order to develop your own arguments. We will tackle the challenges of writing incrementally and in unison, starting from the text itself and moving through multiple drafts in order to craft compelling literary essays.