Writing and Madness: Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis

An amazing and insightful book. Through literary texts by Nerval, Flaubert, Balzac, and Henry James, and engaging the work of post-structuralist thinkers Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jaques Lacan, Felman examines the relationship between madness and language, literature, and philosophy. At issue always is the position madness occupies in Western thought, and the question of how madness gets caught up in the very words we use to describe it. This is a necessary read for anyone interested in literary criticism, post-structuralism, and/or psychoanalysis. Highly recommended!

This is perhaps Felman's most widely read book: her collection of essays called Writing And Madness (Literature/ Philosophy/ Psychoanalysis) which was published in French in 1978 and appeared in translation 1985. Writing And Madness, Felman notes in the reprint of 2003, is her most literary theoretical book, which still maintains its popularity even though she has worked in many other related areas, such as her key feminist text What Does a Woman Want? Writing and Sexual Difference (1993), and her work on testimony with Dori Laub in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (1992). Once more, in Writing And Madness Felman returns to and expands upon "the specificity of literature by exploring literature's constitutive relation to what culture has excluded under the label `madness' (nonsense, alienating strangeness, a transgressive excess, an illusion, a delusion, a disease)." In exploring these relations, Felman is able to interrogate modernity as the age of psychiatry, and its power-knowledge base, where literature functions at the margins, reclaiming and critiquing structures of dominance and exclusion. Richard J. Lane From, Fifty Key Literary Theorists (Routledge, 2006)