Madness and Introspection
In the dominant discourse madness is considered as the opposite of rationality. It concerns the decline, and in extreme cases even the disappearance of rationality in the organization of human conduct and experience. I will explore a more recent, modernist discourse on madness. The new discourse does not understand madness as a decline of rationality, but as an increase or intensification of reason. This modernist discourse on madness manifests itself in literary novels that magnify the practice of introspection to the most extreme extent. In order to better understand the radical effects of introspection through first-person narration, I will focus on the Dutch novel A Posthumous Confession (Een nagelaten bekentenis) from 1894 by Marcellus Emants. In order to understand the literary and psychological impact of this activity comparisons will bemade of Emants’ novel with other narratives
that consist of the same speech act of relentless introspection, first of all with Robert Musil’s monumental icon of modernism, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, then with Why I am not Mad (Waarom ik niet krankzinnig ben) from 1929 by the Dutch writer Maurits Dekker, and the novella The Kreutzer Sonata by the Russian writer Lev Tolstoy (1891).
Ernst van Alphen is professor of Literary Studies at Universiteit Leiden. His publications include Failed Images: Photography and Its Counter-Practices (Valiz 2018), Staging the Archive: Art and Photography in the Age of New Media (Reaktion Books 2014), Art in Mind: How Contemporary Images Shape Thought (University of Chicago Press 2005), Armando: Shaping Memory (NAi Publishers 2000) Caught By History: Holocaust Effects In Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory (Stanford U.P 1997), Francis Bacon and The Loss of Self (Harvard U.P 1995).
The lecture is organised by the HAS and RSCPR research groups