ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

Is madness necessary to creativity? The myth of the cursed writer embodies two extremes of inspiration: divine vision and insanity. In Plato’s description of the mad poet in Ion, these two qualities of inspiration are elided, and it is the fact that the poet is out of his mind, “in a state of unconsciousness,” that occasions his communion with the divine: “For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him.” The myth of the cursed writer is a constellation of values and prejudices regarding the social position of the artist (marginal), and assumptions regarding the artist’s attitudes and moral stance (anti-utilitarian and rebellious). It posits a hierarchical opposition between rational discourse and unruly “inspired” discourse, and a division between literature and the world. “Was it madness, or a work of art?” Foucault asks in Madness and Civilization. “Inspiration, or hallucination? A spontaneous babble of words, or the pure origins of language? Must its truth, even before its birth, be taken from the wretched truth of men, or discovered far beyond its origin, in the being that it presumes?” This panel will consider the relationship between self, language, and society in terms of the association of creativity and madness, and representations of mental illness in literature. Emphasis will be given to discussion of madness as associated with inspiration; as a rejection of society’s norms; as related to linguistic disjunction or displacement; and as a breach of the boundaries of temporality or self.

Friday, March 24

Colin Clarke, Suffolk County Community College
“Bewitched All Along: Madness and American Poetry in the Mid Twentieth Century”
Clayton Dion, University of Western Ontario
“’Mad Generation’: Madness as Social Construction in the Literature of the Beat Generation”
Rachel Galvin, Princeton University
“Cursed Poet: The Case of Alejandra Pizarnik”
Sheri Goh, Goldsmiths College, University of London
“’Madness,’ Psychotherapy, and the Writings of Anne Sexton”

Saturday, March 25

Gregory Brophy, University of Western Ontario
“Impressionable Minds: Inscribing Interiority in the Literature of Possession”
Kenneth Roon, Jr., Binghamton University
“Language, Madness and Utopia”
Brandy Schillace, Case Western University
“’Temporary Failure of Mind’: Déjà Vu, Epilepsy and Mysteries of Udolpho”
Sherah Wells, University of Warwick
“Dissolution of an Irreducible Difference: Madness in the Texts of Antonia White”

Sunday, March 26

Beatriz Cruz, University of Puerto Rico
“The Poetics of Madness in Gonzalo de Berceo’s Milagros de Nuestra Señora”
Gareth Jenkins, University of Wollongong
“Anthony Mannix: Riding the Beast Side-Saddle”
Faye Ran, Metropolitan College of New York
“The Literary Process: Definition, Diagnosis and ‘Cure’”