New Summer Course from Germanic Studies

German E-311/Comparative Literature C 313/English L 373

Summer Session I

M, T, Th, 2:25 - 4:25, Ballantine Hall 236

Michel Chaouli, Assoc. Professor of German (chaouli@indiana.edu)

Narratives of Madness

One of the defining features of the Enlightenment—perhaps the defining feature—has been to ghettoize madness, both philosophically and socially, to define madness as the absence of reason and reason as the absence of madness. As the circularity of this definition might suggest, the relationship of the two is never quite settled, and reason (or, in most cases, Reason) lives with the perpetual anxiety of harboring madness in its midst. We will see that this anxious tension between the two is expressed most powerfully in literary texts, not so much where madness becomes the explicit theme but rather in the nooks and crannies of fictional language itself. Here are some of the questions the course will address: if madness can be represented at all, how and where does it happen? does literature serve to contain folly in order to affirm reason? or does its appeal, its force, lie in toying with madness, in being toyed with by madness? Texts by Kleist, C.B. Brown, Sade, Hoffmann, Poe, Dostoyewski, Nietzsche, Freud, Kafka, Foucault. All readings and discussion in English.