By C. Wiesenthal
How are signs of psychic alienation variously enfigured in literary texts? and the way do readers continually determine in a few type of the 'madness' they try and work out? those are a number of the questions addressed through Figuring insanity , a examine which employs the insights of present post-structuralist psychoanalysis and semiotic thought to envision the complicated interimplication of the topic and item of insanity that's continually implied via the dynamics of analytic dia-gnosis. In its specialise in the consequences of writing and studying symptoms of insanity, the learn bargains new interpretations of either canonical and non-canonical texts by way of authors spanning the interval from Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope to Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Henry James.
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Extra info for Figuring Madness in Nineteenth-Century Fiction
Sample text
In fact, however, we have seen that this is not entirely so; the almost primer-like prose of the journal narrative we read has neither the incoherence nor the combative, visceral force of the unpleasantly pugilistic wallpaper. At least in a technical sense an elementary 'easy read,' the journal is quite the antithesis of the text on the wall, which Jacobus herself later notes is defined precisely by 'its resistance to being read' (245). Perhaps a more tenable position to adopt, then, would be to suggest that the first-person narrative of the story evinces the dual senses of 'conversion' as both a symptom of the narrator's hysteria and a sign of Gilman's inveterate didacticism.
Pirst published in German in 1836. The English edition to which I refer appeared in 1841. See Eich (1986) for a fuller discussion of nineteenth-century German semiology. It is interesting to note that Schill anticipates Barthes' distinction between symptoms and signs, and the physician's pivotal role in the transformation of the one into the other: 'only medical tact,' he avers, the judicious assembling of the various component 'characters' of a disease based on 'close observation and well-instructed experience,can convert [the) symptom into a sign' (11).
As Langer's article challenges the story's status as a 'universal woman's text' (423), that is, so my work on its treatment of language and madness implicitly calls into question its status as exclusively a 'w01nan's' text. , Paris, 1746- 8), Vol. 3, 977, cited in Foucault 99- 100. See also John Haslam, Observations on Madness and Mclanc/wly (London: G. Hayden, 1809) 4. Since there is 'no established formula for processing psychotic experience,' Evelyn Keitel notes in Rending Psychoses, modern authors of the 'psychopathography genre' necessarily seek 'novel ways of communicat[ing] it' (5).