CSLC 115 Kleist, Kafka, and the Poetics of Madness

This course will investigate the concept of madness as both a social category and one of the crucial terms of art and literature.  On the one hand, madness often carries with it a negative connotation, as a statement or mental state beyond the realm of sense. Yet on the other, aesthetic theory has long considered madness a necessary condition of great art. For the philosopher Immanuel Kant, the art of the genius must break the rules of style and explode the bounds of the ordinary sense in order to be exceptional. Art, in this sense must necessarily push the boundaries of the normal, straddle the realms of madness and sanity and, in doing so, transform the categories we use to understand the world. Thus by seeing madness not as some eternal category, but as constructed and deconstructed in concrete contexts, the dialectic of madness and genius forces upon us the following questions: How does the concept of madness get constructed? Who gets to decide who is and isn't mad and why? Why is the creation of art so tightly bound up with concept of madness? What does this tell us about how we make sense of the world and the possibilities of changing our own forms of understanding? We will investigate these questions by reading works of literature and philosophy that directly and indirectly address issues of madness and its relationship to creativity.  Readings will include works by Michel Foucault, Franz Kafka, Heinrich von Kleist, Honore de Balzac, Virginia Woolf, Deleuze & Guattari, Goethe, Adalbert Stifter, Immanuel Kant, and Ralf Waldo Emerson.