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This essay explores Proust's use of Vinteuil as a way to consider the relationship between artistic genius and perceived eccentricity. Vinteuil is presented both a 'foolish old man' and a composer of genius, thus staging a tension between the contingent and absolute nature of art. Proust's metaphorical use of music becomes a model for the creative process, where the 'confused music' of inspiration must be translated into coherent expression. Yet, Proust's treatment of Vinteuil and his musical analogies point to the mysteries and disturbances inherent in art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Euthalian Prologue to the Letters of Paul is found in hundreds of late ancient and medieval editions of the Pauline corpus, presenting readers with a prefatory biography of the apostle that both aligns and departs from canonical traditions. Notably, the Prologue depicts Paul's violence against early Christian assemblies as a manifestation of Jewish μανία , triggered by prophetic foresight and healed by Christ on the road to Damascus. Previous studies primarily examine the Prologue's connection to canonical sources. This article explores its relationship with other late ancient expressions of Paul's life. It argues specifically that the Prologue's depiction of Paul has been shaped – either directly or indirectly – by the writings of John Chrysostom, based on otherwise unique shared thematic elements. Its findings contribute to our understanding of the Prologue's nebulous origins, its rhetorical objectives, and Chrysostom's already massive impact on the reception of Pauline literature and tradition in the late ancient and medieval periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1939, Marília, a thirty-year-old Brazilian housewife, residing in São Paulo, killed her lover, Armando, with an axe and gunshots. She turned herself in to the police and was admitted by her brother-in-law to the Pinel Sanatorium, a psychiatric institution catering to the city's more affluent social groups. The sources for this research include clinical documents—such as a medical report, lab tests, prescriptions, and a letter written by Marília—as well as newspaper articles from São Paulo that reported on the crime. Drawing on theoretical and methodological frameworks from the socio-cultural history of emotions, the history of women and gender, and the history of madness and psychiatry, this article identifies the emotions that surface in the different documents recounting Marília's story. Our primary objective is to analyze these emotions, not to explore their specific meanings, but to understand what they produce. I aim to comprehend how the collection of these emotions, as articulated across the various narratives I examine, operates through shared meanings to construct both an event and a subject: Marília. The different narratives about her life, including her own, and the crime she committed, highlight two central emotions: sadness and anger. This analysis demonstrates that these emotions operate within an emotional framework that defines places, possibilities, and limitations for women, grounded in the perception of their interconnected bodies and minds, social markers of difference, and expert discourses. It also reveals that emotional resistances are persistent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the representation of wrath in relation to the topic of shipwreck in literary texts from 17th-century Spain. As seen in the emblematic genre of the time, as well as in novellas and theatre plays, wrath is represented as the shipwreck of reason. Lack of control and the destruction of the mind as consequences of anger are associated with the capsizing of ships in marine storms. From the Renaissance and well into the late 17th-century, a sound mind is figuratively equivalent to the tranquil voyage in which the ship is in control of the maritime space. By contrast, the reckless and uncontrollable mind is comparable to the ship tossed and destroyed by the tempest, unable to return from the abyss of the ocean depths. As demonstrated in the literary texts of the time, to let the mind be taken over by the passions, particularly wrath and love, was frequently correlated with madness and, thus, with moral decline, as under contemporaneous thought, insanity was connected to ethical degeneration and conversely, sanity with Christian virtues. Moreover, the symbolic implication of the shipwreck motif in Early Modern Spanish literature also reflected the medical notions of the time—namely those related to the bodily humors. Within these sociocultural coordinates, wrath and unrequited love are correlated to choleric and melancholic natures that can lead to madness and social unrest. In sum, the connection of wrath to nautical devastation is an effective means to convey social and political commentary and transmit didactic messages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Nesir: Journal of Literary Studies / Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi is the property of Nesir: Journal of Literary Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The Marsden Case, Ford's first published novel after the First World War, has received relatively little critical attention. This paper aims to redress the balance by offering a sustained reading which illustrates how the context of the First World War interacts with a major theme in Ford's oeuvre, madness. It follows Ford's maxim that the novel was a place for inquiry and illustrates how Ford's narrator explores the questions of who succumbs to madness and why. It highlights a debate at work in the novel on the role of talk in creating or curing nervous breakdowns. The novel's opacity is part of a challenge to the wisdom of directly confronting or revisiting painful experiences, which speaks not only to the effects of the war but to the value of emerging Freudian psychotherapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Arabic Language & Literature (1735-9767) is the property of University of Tehran and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article on the intriguing second-/eighth-century Iraqi Muslim ascetic poet Rayḥāna al-Majnūna, or Rayḥāna "The Mad," consists of two parts: (1) a study contextualizing her persona and corpus and arguing that her historical and folkloric identity as a black woman poet situates her at a creative nexus of wisdom, madness, and worship, and (2) appendices including translations of her poems and their anecdotal frameworks as they are preserved in three medieval sources: ʿUqalāʾ al-majānīn by Abū al-Qāsim al-Ḥasan ibn Ḥabīb al-Nīsābūrī (d. 406 H/1015–16 CE), Ṣifat al-ṣafwa by Ibn al-Jawzī (d. circa 597 H/1201 CE), and Talkhīṣ al-mutashābih by al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī (d. 463 H/1071 CE). It is hoped that the translations will give the reader direct knowledge of Rayḥāna's distinctive poems and that the contextual analysis will support informed interpretations of both the poems and the narratives in which they are embedded through its attention to various discursive prisms including textual traditions relating to mental health, religious devotion, and women's writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais is the property of Centro de Estudos Sociais and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Video games are known for many things, but nuanced portrayals of characters with mental illness might not be one of them. This trend, however, has gradually started to shift with games like Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, which aim to convey a genuine experience of mental illness to the player. Through a close reading of different instances in the game, this paper shows how Hellblade complicates the usual sanist ideas seen in most other games by taking an ambiguous stance, using mental illness as a representational tool. Furthermore, it avoids some of the more sensationalist and problematic tropes often employed in such representations, like the supercrip and the Cartesian divide of the body and mind. In order to show this, we have employed Mitchel and Snyder's concept of narrative prosthesis to demonstrate how the game does not in fact rely on Senua's disability as an exotic feature of the narrative to hook players in. By combining insights from disability and mad studies, we show how this game is a step in the right direction when it comes to challenging the perceptions of mental illness prevalent in pop culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the dynamics of perception of the mentally ill by the Russian society and the state authorities with the help of comparative-historical method and analysis of sources. The chronological framework of the work covers the period from the first attempts to help the insane with the help of spiritual healing in monasteries to the large-scale reforms of the 1860-ies and the revolution in the organization of public medicine. The author is most interested in the changes caused by the formation of psychiatry as a separate branch of medical science, including the emergence of expert psychiatrists and the introduction of psychiatric trials procedures by the middle of the XIX century. For a detailed study of such innovations in psychiatric practice, the procedure of examination of the mentally ill, carried out in the Samara province in the 1860-ies, was chosen. The source base for the research is archival materials from the funds of the Central State Archive of the Samara Region, as well as scientific and published written sources. These include the first Russian textbooks and manuals on psychiatry. There is a growing interest in the study of the phenomenon of «madness» in modern historiography. However, there was practically no large-scale systematic research on the history of the origin of psychiatry in the Samara province in the middle of the XIX century. The findings obtained in the course of the study give an idea of the changing perception of the insane by society and the authorities. There is a transfer of the main role in the trials of the mentally ill and, accordingly, the right to make a conclusion about their condition from representatives of the administrative authorities to psychiatrists. An attitude towards insanity is being formed and consolidated not as a social danger, but as a disease requiring specialized medical care. Thus, madness is transformed from a social phenomenon into a medical one.

This article explores the representation of wrath in relation to the topic of shipwreck in literary texts from 17th-century Spain. As seen in the emblematic genre of the time, as well as in novellas and theatre plays, wrath is represented as the shipwreck of reason. Lack of control and the destruction of the mind as consequences of anger are associated with the capsizing of ships in marine storms. From the Renaissance and well into the late 17th-century, a sound mind is figuratively equivalent to the tranquil voyage in which the ship is in control of the maritime space. By contrast, the reckless and uncontrollable mind is comparable to the ship tossed and destroyed by the tempest, unable to return from the abyss of the ocean depths. As demonstrated in the literary texts of the time, to let the mind be taken over by the passions, particularly wrath and love, was frequently correlated with madness and, thus, with moral decline, as under contemporaneous thought, insanity was connected to ethical degeneration and conversely, sanity with Christian virtues. Moreover, the symbolic implication of the shipwreck motif in Early Modern Spanish literature also reflected the medical notions of the time—namely those related to the bodily humors. Within these sociocultural coordinates, wrath and unrequited love are correlated to choleric and melancholic natures that can lead to madness and social unrest. In sum, the connection of wrath to nautical devastation is an effective means to convey social and political commentary and transmit didactic messages.

In 1939, Marília, a thirty-year-old Brazilian housewife, residing in São Paulo, killed her lover, Armando, with an axe and gunshots. She turned herself in to the police and was admitted by her brother-in-law to the Pinel Sanatorium, a psychiatric institution catering to the city's more affluent social groups. The sources for this research include clinical documents—such as a medical report, lab tests, prescriptions, and a letter written by Marília—as well as newspaper articles from São Paulo that reported on the crime. Drawing on theoretical and methodological frameworks from the socio-cultural history of emotions, the history of women and gender, and the history of madness and psychiatry, this article identifies the emotions that surface in the different documents recounting Marília's story. Our primary objective is to analyze these emotions, not to explore their specific meanings, but to understand what they produce. I aim to comprehend how the collection of these emotions, as articulated across the various narratives I examine, operates through shared meanings to construct both an event and a subject: Marília. The different narratives about her life, including her own, and the crime she committed, highlight two central emotions: sadness and anger. This analysis demonstrates that these emotions operate within an emotional framework that defines places, possibilities, and limitations for women, grounded in the perception of their interconnected bodies and minds, social markers of difference, and expert discourses. It also reveals that emotional resistances are persistent.

This article discusses impasses in the process of deinstitutionalizing madness, based on the results of a census conducted in Private Therapeutic Residences in a municipality in southern Brazil. These residences, viewed as contemporary asylums that still exist contrary to the law and current mental health policies in the country, reflect on the fate of lives subjected to asylum practices in such establishments, ones considered unworthy of mourning. What has been identified is that the intensification of the asylum logic results from counter-reformist forces updated within the context of Brazilian psychiatric reform. This conservative movement is particularly observed in segregating practices in mental health related to the care of people who use alcohol and other drugs. The resulting reflection calls for the need to build strategies to reinvent the anti-asylum struggle in light of our current challenges, which reaffirms greater attention with respect to freedom as a non-negotiable premise.

This paper examines the role of confessional discourse in Leonid Andreev’s “Thought” and “My Notes.” In these works, confession not only serves as a significant narrative device that creates a particular mode of psychological reality. It is also directly related to the interpretation of the meaning of the stories. On the one hand, the confessional intention presented in the texts shows the struggle to gain self-knowledge and the urgency of overcoming the isolation of one’s existence. On the other hand, it does not lead to the discovery of truth and only unveils its elusive quality. With a particular focus on the representation of existential consciousness and the realization of the poetics of play, this study examines, among others, the principle of dialogism and the significance of paratextual elements. The paper argues that the desire for selfdisclosure reflected in “Thought” and “My Notes” reveals the paradoxical nature of the confessional narrative, which is transformed into a certain kind of play, leading to selfdeception and the fictitious construction of identity.

In the last centuries of the Middle Ages, reason and the faculty of judgement were at the heart of the construction of a model of masculinity promoted by clerics for the laity. While the pastoral literature and sermons produced by the mendicant friars made it imperative for men to be able to love their wives in a measured way, passionate love was as much condemned by these clerical texts as it was by the medical treatises and chapters devoted to medicine in the encyclopaedias of the thirteenth century. According to their authors, excessive love leads to madness and folly and runs counter to the model of perfection embodied by masculinity. Yet madness in love and lovesickness, as mental pathologies, are specifically assimilated to the very essence of masculinity in its physiological dispositions, and are attributed to men following the commentary of Girardus Bituricensis. This article explores this ambivalence in a dialogue between medical discourse and clerical sources.

The article focuses on American fiction and detective thrillers where the writer and his double feature as central characters. Such a combination has not previously received special attention. The divided mind provides a wide range of possibilities for fascination and exploring the fundamental fears of fragmentation and potential destruction of the Self. In Stephen King’s novella “Secret Window, Secret Garden” (1990), crime, duplicity, madness and dissociative amnesia are integrated into the story of the writer's block. The present article, among other things, analyzes the adaptation of the novella — David Koepp’s Secret Window, 2004. Besides, it highlights the changes that the script underwent. Koepp came up with his own ending that was radically different from the Epilogue of King's story. Alongside with madness proper, King's horror and Koepp's film deconstruct the writer’s block as the result of unresolved traumas and the cause of a whole bunch of pathologies, as well as the fear of breakdown. The novella and its screen version are, in fact, phenomenological studies of mental disorders. A close comparative analysis shows that the film offers a rare example of the superiority of adaptation over the original. A particular attention in the article is paid to the imagery of ears of corn in the film, functioning both as a cannibalistic grotesque and as a visual metaphor of success.

Not only the general theme of madness, but also the features of the narrative allow us to compare the Garshin’s "A Red Flower" with "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" by Dostoevsky and "Ward No. 6" by Chekhov. It turns out that the storytelling process creates similar problems, the solution of which each writer provides in his own way: see personalisation, dual narrative and apparent objectivity. Motifs along with metaphorical constructions (f.e. dream, luminaries, illness) are also have common features. In Dostoevsky's story, the concept of the "fantastic" becomes a form of path to the personal narrative of the subject of the text, who analyzes the story, develops new linguistic and semantic means for the presentation of history, in which laughter-madness is becoming the generative principle. Consequently, both the parable character and the transformation of the short story into a short novel by Dostoevsky are realized, despite the fact that there is a first-person narrator. In "A Red Flower" there is also the mission of saving the world as a "crazy man", but the narrator in the third person and the narrative does not turn into a story-parable. The story seems to reproduce an anecdote about the adventures of the hero. At the same time, the uniqueness of Garshin's work lies in the way the world is renamed "illy", i. e. metaphorical language. In Chekhov's short novel, the metaphorical plan unfolds the comprehension of the hero, giving the corpus of "crazy narratives" a new touch thanks to completely non-random details – reminiscent of Garshin's. As a result of the analysis, it becomes clear that "Ward No. 6" implements the parable beginning, even if it does not unfold into a personal narrative similar to "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man".

The aim of this paper is to develop and discuss mad studies as a methodology and mad reading as a method for critical heritage studies. In doing so, this paper acts on persistent calls to discuss methodologies in critical heritage studies as well as calls to explore the heritage connected to psychiatric hospitals and madness. The text introduces and develops mad studies as a methodology for critical heritage studies, here explained as a way of seeing and analysing heritage from the perspective of mad-centred knowledge productions. The article further develops mad reading as a method for analysing heritage. Mad reading is explained as (1) a situated method, (2) a different way to approach the object of study (3) a method to expose and challenge sanism and (4) a method to reveal madness where it is not clearly visible. The paper is predominantly theory-driven but situates the discussion in relation to previous and ongoing research in heritage studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Madness as a medical, social, literary, and philosophical issue has always been the focus of thinkers. Avicenna, as a philosopher-physician, investigated and analyzed this issue in two medical (physical) and philosophical (metaphysical) areas. In the framework of medical science, based on the mechanism of human temperament, he analyzes why madness occurs. However, temperamental disorders are the starting point of Avicenna's philosophical explanation of melancholic illusions, and Avicenna's innovation was sought in this field. Temperament disorder leads to a disorder in the functioning of the rūh-i bukhārī, and this leads to a disorder in the relationship between the rational soul (nafs-i nāteqah) and the body. Through this disorder, a disconnection is created between the mental forms of the madmen and reality, because the imaginative (mukhayyalah) faculty as the generator of imaginary forms, and the common sense (hiss al-mushtarak) as the home of tangible and imaginary forms due to the disconnection or weakening of their connection with the intellectual faculty, deprives the insane person of this possibility to separate the illusive forms from the real. The main problem that this research delves into is to explain the phenomenon of madness from Avicenna's point of view with a descriptive- analytical approach, and it is an attempt to provide a detailed and comprehensive presentation of his point of view based on medical and philosophical foundations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the impact of mental illness on the relationship between middle-class fathers and sons in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England. Using sources that include autobiographies, oral histories, press reports of violence, and records of appeals against conscription, the article argues that shame was not the dominant reaction. Many mentally ill men lost masculine status and agency within the family, but both fathers and sons were much more likely to respond to illness with loving concern, attempts at negotiation and pacification, than to use their power over vulnerable relatives with attempts to confine and hide them from sight. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article develops an examination of the main aspects to be considered in the analysis that the philosophies of G. Canguilhem and M. Foucault devote to the problem of madness. The text stipulates the philosophical conditions of approach that both authors elaborate on to think about the problem of norms in the vital and social sphere. The question: what is crazy? then becomes the question of the social and political practices that have been developed concerning madmen and madness, evidencing the relevance that Canguilhem and Foucault give to the problem of norms, either in an ontological and/or historical-political framework of understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Tropelías: Revista de Teoría de la Literatura y Literatura Comparada is the property of Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article discussed the two common consecutive concepts: stupidity and madness in Nizar Qabbani’s collections. There are two reasons for focusing on this topic. The first is the lack of the critical works devoted to the topic despite of the great attention paid to this poet's experience. The second is some interesting poetic meanings through which he could manage to say what has been unsaid before although he created his stupid and mad characters from a heavy literary heritage. Therefore, to approach some of these meanings, we started with some highlights of the most eminent problems and themes which we are going to go through. The aim of this study is to raise three issues. The first one is exploring the textual connection between the two terms: stupidity and madness. The second is identifying the transformations of stupidity in Nizar's poetry. The third issue we focused on is what we called the madness of love/madness of literature . By studying Nizar's writings, we came up with several findings. The most important is that the two terms: stupidity and madness and what is derived from them in addition to their synonymes have common semantic field and connection. However, if we seperate them in use, we can see stupidity meanings have witnessed several transformations which made the ugly looks beautiful and the beautiful looks ugly. In this study, we also found out that there is nothing like the mad love and to madness all the literary works refer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emerging evidence suggests that transgender individuals are more likely than cisgender peers to receive a diagnosis with a primary mental disorder. Attributions of madness, though, may serve the social function of dismissing and discrediting transgender individual's self-perceptions. The narratives of individuals who stop or reverse an initial gender transition who also identify as living with mental health conditions can sometimes amplify these socio-political discourses about transgender people. Through a critical mental health lens, this article presents a qualitative analysis of 16 individuals who stopped or reversed a gender transition and who also reported a primary mental health condition. Semi-structured, virtual interviews were conducted with people living in Canada. Applying constructivist grounded theory methodology, and following an iterative, inductive approach to analysis, we used the constant comparative method to analyse these 16 in-depth interviews. Results show rich complexity such that participants narrated madness in nuanced and complex ways while disrupting biased attitudes that madness discredited their thoughts and feelings, including prior gender dysphoria. Instead, participants incorporated madness into expanding self-awareness and narrated their thoughts and feelings as valid and worthy. Future research must consider provider's perspectives, though, in treating mad individuals who detransitioned, since alternate gender-affirming care models may better support the identification and wellness of care-seeking individuals who may be identified (in the past, present, or future) as mad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An astronomical concept up to the eighteenth century, 'eccentricity' started to be used to refer to behaviours considered as odd, strange, rare, extravagant, etc. Once reified into a personality trait, it gained explanatory power. This not only increased its popularity but also facilitated its links with psychopathology and neuropsychology, and, via the shared concept of madness, with the notions of genius and creativity. This Classic Text describes the process whereby Alienism (Psychiatry) medicalized eccentricity. To this day, the latter remains firmly attached to 'psychoticism' and to some personality disorders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An 'inquisition' (or inquiry) held before a Justice of the Peace was the primary instrument for management of lunacy in eighteenth-century England. Yet its purpose was to protect wealth rather than the individual. The 1766 case book of Dr John Monro, London's leading doctor for madness, unexpectedly records a consultation that links two siblings who both had inquisitions. Nicholas Jeffreys' only son was attested lunatic in 1744: to circumvent inheritance through primogeniture, Jeffreys directed the family wealth to his last living child. One of his three daughters married Lord Camden, a former Lord Chancellor: after her and her second sister's deaths, the last-surviving sister was also placed under inquisition in 1780, to ensure the inheritance for his own family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Students diagnosed with mental illness are progressively composing the makeup of our universities' student bodies. With more "mad" students making their way into the academy, this has encouraged many in Mad Studies to consider the challenges they confront in pursuing post-secondary studies. The purpose of this structured literature review of the Mad Studies canon is to tease out themes apropos to the education of adults through a critical pedagogy lens. Themal categories were organized around: Mad Studies course development and curriculum, popular culture and arts-based education, contesting the university seeped in sanism, surveilling mad bodies/minds, the university demands resilience, the politics of course instruction/teaching, mad disclosures, educational policy, and threat and risk management. This paper concludes by discussing the glaring voids in the literature and recommendations for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the connection between madness and critiques of the chivalric romance genre in two late Renaissance works, Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso and Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quijote de la Mancha. The satire of chivalric romance in these works of fiction caution against nascent modes of thinking in imperial societies for the implementation of chivalric ideas to inspire and promote imperial conquests in Latin America through juxtaposition with the Muslim and Moorish conquest in the Maghreb and through metaphorical island governance. In order to make such critiques, these novels implement the madness of their parodic knights to disguise their critiques. This practice establishes a precedent which later literature can employ to make sociocultural critique covertly, to the detriment of disability representations as literary devices or metaphors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper pays homage to the late Professor, Brij Lal, for the critical role he played in debunking colonial and patriarchal myths about Fiji's Indian indentured (girmitiya) women. From as early as 1985, Lal critiqued the way the British administrators wielded power over displaced female labourers by misrepresenting them in internal and external exchanges. My specific focus here is on the way he deconstructed colonial and patriarchal tropes associated with indentured women such as their alleged immorality and promiscuousness, 'sexual jealousy', 'maternal negligence' and madness, by situating these constructs within a specific historical context. With these interventions as the foundation for this paper, I will illustrate how my own interdisciplinary investigations in the interconnecting fields of gender, indenture, subaltern studies and minor history have attempted to address Lal's concern that girmitiya women's perspectives were absent in the historical records. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the representation of mental disorders in Anglo-Saxon hagiographies, analyzing perceptions, symptoms, cultural contexts, and narrative purposes. Anglo-Saxon views on the mind and soul, influenced by both vernacular and classical traditions, shape understandings of madness. Old English terminology for madness reflects diverse cultural INFLUENCES, ranging from naturalistic-organic to supernatural etiologies. Analysis of the hagiographies show that there was a tendency to depict demon possession as madness, which could partly be attributed to the Anglo-Saxon way of perceiving the soul and mind, partly to the narrative purpose, and partly to the influential sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Selçuk University Journal of Faculty of Letters is the property of Selcuk Universitesi Edebiyat Fakultesi Dergisi and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper engages with Slavoj Žižek's notion of the 'vanishing mediator,' by taking a closer look at his study of the Hegelian 'night of the world.' It specifically probes into the notion of the divine madness that becomes the 'Ground' for the sane, subjective God of The Bible to Word the universe into being. Following this, it proceeds to bring the aforementioned into discourse with Bloodborne, which, in one of its endings, presents the curious case of the next stage of human evolution, i.e., a transcendence into Godhood, which occurs during a similar night. The paper, in essence, presents a dramatic stage for this madness to play out in its reading of Bloodborne, while tracing its vestiges using a postsecular-psychoanalytical lens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to ancient times, Iranians were among the first people to recognize mental abnormalities as diseases. They explained the causes of mental diseases using various scientific methods based on observation and experience and suggested practical ways for treatment. The main treatment methods they proposed included the use of medicine and other physical treatments. In some cases, psychotherapy methods were also used to treat mental patients. This study was conducted using the analytical-documentary method, with authentic traditional medical texts, literary and historical works, and other narrative texts that documented the treatment of mental patients as sources. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that the Iranian culture, and particularly Iranian medical culture, has had a rational approach to mental disorders for a long time. Iranian doctors have avoided superstitious beliefs and instead sought scientific and experimental methods for treatment. The findings of this study suggest that, in comparison to approaches of Western medicine to mental disorders in the pre-modern era, which often involved rejecting such patients and not treating mental patients, Iranian doctors focused on the underlying causes of mental disorders. They treated patients using scientific methods while also maintaining a human and compassionate approach.

Identity, often conceptualized as a continuum of the ego, lies at the conflux of both individual and collective interpretations of reality. The constructions of reality and identity are, however, far from being a purely cognitive trait; both are constructed through interaction with others, to the point where faulty interactions can lead to a lack of individuation, and the echo chambers of the Manosphere can skew a subject’s interpretation of reality. The postmodern turn of cinema after the 1980s, acknowledging this relativism, presented deeply pathological characters in a more nuanced way, giving way to ambiguity. Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman is a pathological character who is described as having pathological traits but who has nonetheless been adopted by the Manosphere as an idealized role model. This article aims to comment on the mythical subversion of the myth of Narcissus in the narrative, the identity problem that Patrick Bateman suffers from, and to disentangle the processes whereby the Manosphere is misappropriating classical myths, mythologizing narrative characters to phenomenologically construct a different perception of reality, and how these problems are linked with an unrealized identity.

AbstractIn this paper I explore Walter Benjamin’s complex thoughts about the concept of experience to illuminate a central paradox when thinking about madness. This paradox concerns the need to hold together constellations of concepts that appear to be diametrically opposed. On the one hand there is the realm of the psychopathological; a psychiatric thinking of madness as mental illness that refers to suffering, loss of existence, and dysfunction. On the other hand, there is a thinking about madness as a diverse and different experience, as possibility, illumination, and difference. Benjamin’s writings on experience can be particularly fertile here because he acknowledges the contradictions in experience, at certain points emphasising the loss of experience and at other points focussing on the possibilities of a new experience even within a destruction of experience. I will explore three aspects of Benjamin’s reflections on experience and their relationship to an experience of psychosis; the loss of experience in modernity and the possibilities that lie within such a loss, the turn towards the object in Benjamin’s account of experience, and finally the concept of the limit-experience. I conclude by considering Benjamin’s idea of the dialectical image and apply this idea to the experience of madness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Autoethnographic scholarship helps account for the conditions of harm, care, and resistance in academic spaces within the ‘neoliberal university’, yet interventions can be limited by normative care frameworks that reinscribe ableist logics. This paper focuses on this genre of scholarship in feminist geography, here referred to as feminist geographies of academic care, and the ways attempts at resolving the academic “care crisis” get diverted and (re)oriented toward institutional ends. I use “disability as methodology” to read if, and how the system of (dis)ability structures and enmeshes the university’s imperative of rationality with ambivalent feminist desires for belonging and something else. In turn, a clear rehabilitative narrative arc emerges in this literature that indexes better futures through social cohesion and the (implicit) absence of mental disability and neurodivergence. I argue that this narrative prioritizes attachment to the university over those most harmed by it, but which can be disrupted through trans/crip and neuroqueer dispositions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to investigate fragmentation and interruption in Foucault’s concept of the subject, power and madness. The research explores the concept of fragmentation in modernity, particularly in relation to subjectivity, power, and madness. It discusses how the shift towards individualism and the erosion of traditional values have led to a sense of disconnection and fragmentation in society.The research states that fragmentation produces multiplicity of meanings and fragments the concept of the subject in which we have a new kind of fragmented subjectivity that is defined by multiplicity. While fragmentation of the subject can lead to madness, it gives an important linear narrative. The research also delves into the role of power in shaping subjectivity and the ways in which language and discourse contribute to fragmentation. Furthermore, it examines the connection between madness and language, as well as the exploration of madness in literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to ancient times, Iranians were among the first people to recognize mental abnormalities as diseases. They explained the causes of mental diseases using various scientific methods based on observation and experience and suggested practical ways for treatment. The main treatment methods they proposed included the use of medicine and other physical treatments. In some cases, psychotherapy methods were also used to treat mental patients. This study was conducted using the analytical-documentary method, with authentic traditional medical texts, literary and historical works, and other narrative texts that documented the treatment of mental patients as sources. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that the Iranian culture, and particularly Iranian medical culture, has had a rational approach to mental disorders for a long time. Iranian doctors have avoided superstitious beliefs and instead sought scientific and experimental methods for treatment. The findings of this study suggest that, in comparison to approaches of Western medicine to mental disorders in the pre-modern era, which often involved rejecting such patients and not treating mental patients, Iranian doctors focused on the underlying causes of mental disorders. They treated patients using scientific methods while also maintaining a human and compassionate approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gendered violence and masculinity gained popularity in Malayalam cinema during the last decade, and this study explores the aspects of masculinity, hegemony, gendered space, and violence by examining two recent films: Kumbalangi Nights (2019) and Uyare (2019). The study discusses the construct of masculinity in Malayalam cinema over the decades concerning these films and investigates the hegemonic maintenance of masculinity based on Connell's Masculinities. Understanding masculinity as a construct relies on the 'complete man' image of Shammi, Govind, and Vishal. The study also identifies the diverse masculinities in the films to examine the concept's inclusive nature. The two varied treatments of masculinity, (1) as madness and (2) as crime, based on Foucault's Madness and Civilization, explore the masculinizing gendered spaces of public, private, and domestic. These movies analyze the two patterns of violence put forth by Connell: (1) one is the physical verbal violence that the privileged group uses to sustain their dominance, and (2) that claims masculinity among men in group struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]