Madness and Literature

Mental illness has been a favourite topic for authors throughout the history of literature, and, conversely, psychologists and psychiatrists like Sigmund Freud and Karl Jaspers have been interested in and influenced by literature. Pioneers within philosophy, psychiatry and literature share the endeavour to explore and explain the human mind and behaviour, including what a society deems as being outside perceived normality. This volume engages with literature’s multifarious ways of probing minds and bodies in a state of ill mental health. To encompass this diversity, the theoretical approach is eclectic and transdisciplinary. The cases and the theory are in dialogue with a clinical approach, addressing issues and diagnoses such as trauma, psychosis, bipolar disorder, eating disorders, self-harm, hoarding disorder, PTSD and Digital Sexual Assault. The volume has three parts. Chapters in Part I address literary representations of madness with a historical awareness, outlining the socio-political potentials of madness literature. Part II investigates how representations of mental illness can provide a different way of understanding what it is like to experience alternative states of mind, as well as how theoretical concepts from studies in literature can supplement the language of psychopathology. The chapters in Part III explore ways to apply literary cases in clinical practice. Throughout the book, the contributors explore and explain how the language and discourses of literature (stylistically and theoretically) can teach us something new about what it means to be in ill mental health.

Мотив хвороби в історії літератури і культури посттоталітарних країн Центрально-Східної Європи

The article is dedicated to the issues considered during the international conference “The motive of the disease in the history of literature and culture of post-totalitarian states of Central and Eastern Europe”, which took place on November 6, 2020. The main topics of the speakers were focused on the disease as a weakness in the literature, the trauma of loss, the theme of illness and healing in world literature from its beginning to the present, including the periods of Kyiv Rus, Renaissance, Baroque and Modernism and the traumatic experience in the narratives of the Holodomor, Ukrainian women’s prose and the ability of Ukrainian sacred and decorative, as well as modern women’s art to visualize the disease and help artists overcome their injuries.

“Essa Dama Bate Bué” e o cânone literário angolano

Essa Dama Bate Bué and the Angolan Literary Canon. A relevant topic for the history of literature, the literary canon has been widely questioned and the Angolan literary canon is no exception, being constantly susceptible to changes. The current paper aims at challenging the Angolan literary canon and defending the necessity of including the novel Essa Dama Bate Bué by Yara Monteiro. Published in 2018, it represents an example of silenced literature about women and guerrilla movements during the war for national independence, the subsequent civil war, and the post-conflict period. The book problematizes the presence of women in national wars, the countless roles they played, but also their integration in the post-colonial society, giving insights into a topic largely ignored in Angolan literature. Keywords: Angola, Angolan women, canon, Yara Monteiro, guerrilla movements

Historia literatury inaczej. Komparatystyczne – zagadnieniowe kształcenie literackie… w szkole ponadpodstawowej

Along with the successive reforms of education, the discussion on the method of teaching literature in high school returns, including the role of the history of literature in preparation for the matriculation examination. The article presents the advantages of a comparative approach to literary education in the core curriculum of the Polish language from 2008, which in individual programs prepared by teachers can also be successfully used in themed-chronological teaching, facilitating work with history of literature based, extensive in terms of issues and essential readingscore curriculum from 2018. Examples of original curriculum solutions come from the author’s own experience and were created during her classes of literature didactics at secondary school at the Faculty of Polish Studies of the Jagiellonian University.

Niemożliwa ale niezbędna? – wokół informacji historycznoliterackiej w szkole średniej

This text is about the methods, employed in schools, of putting high school students in touch with cultural tradition. My interest in this issue is connected to the recent appearance of meaning of the “historical and literary order” in the 2018 syllabus, despite the fact that since 1990, the weight attributed to that meaning in syllabi has gradually shrunk, to almost completely disappear in 2002. To answer a question: “why is the history of literature needed to be taught in schools?”, I started my analysis from pointing out the disappearing trust in historical and literary syntheses. This trust has been plummeting for over 40 years, which is connected to the so-called crisis of representation. In my view, the answer to my question may lie in the analysis of the 1949 syllabus document, in which the vision of the past is construed with a very apparent ideological intention, despite efforts to keep up the pretense of objectivity. By exposing the mechanisms that lead the authors of the 1949 document, I try to show to what extent the domination of chronological order opens up the potential of school documents to manipulate the past, which can lead to falsifying the images of cultural tradition.

Positivism in the Mirror of Carnival: The Rabelaisian Chronotope in the Works of E. Zola

This paper deals with using the Rabelaisian cultural code, which the author of the article suggests to be applied to the reading and interpreting of some novels by E. Zola. From the authors point of view, such an experiment allows us to look at French naturalism from a new point of view, as a variant of a typologically recurring phenomenon in the history of literature. For the French naturalistic novel Rabelaisianism is considered as a kind of meaning-generating model, as appropriated communication or as an element of traditional literary discourse. The latter is actualized in a period when the cultural conditions and the nature of the main ideological and aesthetic conflicts became similar to the time of the French Renaissance. The author attempts to apply the theory of the carnival chronotope, which is developed by M.M. Bakhtin, to the interpretation of some of E. Zolas texts. Meanwhile, the concept of the chronotope is considered more widely than that of M.M. Bakhtin: it is proposed to understand the chronotope as a universal model of space-time relations in the novel. The author also views the poetics of the real in the naturalistic novel through the prism of the carnival (i. e. extremely detailed material world); as examples, the motives of food and wine, as well as the motive of rebellion and war as a variant of the war for food and the carnival battle of Shrovetide (pancake week) and Lent are analyzed in the article. The main material used for the analysis is taken from the novels Le Ventre de Paris , 1873 ( The Belly of Paris ), LAssommoir , 1877 ( The Trap ), and Germinal , 1885, by E. Zola.

Bibliographic Information in the Theatre Magazine Artist

The theatre magazine Artist has repeatedly become an object of scientific research. However, despite the wealth of works with a focus on structure of the magazine, the bibliographic section of Artist remains insufficiently studied. The bibliographic information of the journal has not yet become an object of subject-specific research. The empirical basis of the study is a complete set of publications of the theater magazine Artist for the entire period of its existence. Primary attention is paid to the bibliographic section of the journal and the appendix. Research methods are theoretical and historical analysis, generalization and systematization of the results obtained. In the proposed article, the author describes and comprehends the main forms of latent bibliographic information in the theatrical magazine Artist, first of all, the independent section Bibliography. The study defines main thematic areas of the section, its structure and main genres. The author also analyzes the types of bibliographic advertising in the journal: alphabetical directories of plays allowed to be performed, index of plays suitable for amateur shows, announcements on subscription from magazine editors, advertising of new books, ads for subscriptions to other print media. The author comes to the conclusion that along with educational intentions, the magazine staff solved specific selling tasks (sale of the magazine and books distributed through the publishers office). The latent bibliographic information of Artist can be useful for specialists interested in history of literature, journalism and theatre.

Mapowanie kanonu. Literatura polska w perspektywie światowej

The article discusses the research proposal presented in Światowa historia literatury polskiej. Interpretacje [World History of Polish Literature. Interpretations], edited by Magdalena Popiel, Tomasz Bilczewski and Stanley Bill. Mikołajczak contrasts the research concept of world literature with the dominant approaches to the world literature in the area of contemporary literary studies and the traditional model of the history of literature. She reflects on the situation of Polish literature in the world, taking into account the ways in which Polish works circulate in other cultural circles, the possibilities and limitations of translation as well as shifts within the canon. She also indicates the opportunities that open up for Polish literature in the global context.

East and West in Zakia Khairhoum's the End of My Dangerous Secret

Literature is an arena for cross-cultural representation par excellence. It is in the literature that images produce an awareness of the Self and Other, and of the Here and the Elsewhere, however small that awareness maybe. The accounts of many canonical literary figures in the history of literature featured portrayals and descriptions of radically different people and customs, exotic lands, and far-off places where everything is outlandish and anomalous. Literary representation, therefore, plays a pivotal role in shaping perception, creating historical and textual monoliths, stereotypes, and essentialization about ethnic minorities, race, sexuality, and gender. This article investigates the politics of representation of the Self and the Other in Zakia Khairhoum’s novel The End of My Dangerous Secret (Nihayat Sirri L’khatir, 2008) from a postcolonial feminist’s point of view. I argue that Khairhoum does not only shatter the foundations of patriarchy in the Arab world but also undermines and subverts Western colonial discourse and its claim of supremacy. The novel foregrounds a different pattern of representation that has not yet been sufficiently investigated, which is the denigration of both the Self and the Other and the quest for a third cultural reality that is defined in terms of gender equality, justice, human rights and democracy.

Die mythische Existenz eines Romans und seine Wirklichkeit. Ein Prosamanuskript der siebenbürgischen Dichterin Gerda Mieß

Gerda Mieß (born in Bistrita in 1896, dies in Cisnădie in 1954), is know for her verses published in periodicals and anthologies as well as for only collection of her poems (by Dr. Stefan Sienerth in 1987 in Kriterion Verlag Bucharest published). People interested in the history of literature knew that she had also written a novel in her youth, which, howeser, never came to the public during her lifetime or afterwards. Her descendants (the Herbert-László family) hade the manuscript prose work translated into computer script and took steps to publish the novel. It offers an insight into the mentality and behavior of the time around 1910, into the school system of the time and the problems of that time and the problems of women (education and employment of women).