ELIT 426 A Literary History of Madness

Madness here is treated less as a medical category and more as a shifting cultural lens, something literature has used across centuries to negotiate power, gender, race, love, and the limits of reason. The format is seminar-heavy, so expect close reading and sustained discussion of Shakespeare, Poe, the Brontës, Gilman, Goethe and others alongside Foucault and the history of psychiatry, with a research paper where you follow one thread on your own terms. It pairs naturally with earlier survey courses and with theory electives, and gives you a comparative framework that carries over into anything dealing with subjectivity, deviance, or the social construction of the self.