124184 VK BEd 08b.3: VK Cultural Studies for Language Teachers (2021W)

This course will consider how “madness” works as a discourse which has recurrently been analyzed in groundbreaking CS-theories. We will explore how “madness” is represented and constructed in a variety of cultural “texts” and practices (e.g. film, literature, digital media, performance art, subculture phenomena).

The basis of the course form excerpts from Foucault’s groundbreaking study Madness and Civilisation (1961) which decisively inspired cultural theorists of the late 20th cent (see below). Foucault wanted to penetrate beneath the surface of society to find the cultural, intellectual and economic structures that dictate how madness is constructed. His outline of the evolution of “madness” in changing patterns of knowledge of the Renaissance, Age of Reason and Modernity shows how Western culture has experienced, addressed and tried to redress madness as we look at the historical changes in the depiction of unreason and mental illness, doctors and the medical profession, mental patients, and mental institutions - both in documentary and fictional representation.

Our discussion will center upon cultural constructions of and anxieties about deformity, anomaly and aberration resulting in discourses of fear and Othering, but also in disruptive counter-discourses of cultural discontent and defiant civil disobedience. We will encounter the differences and parallels illustrating how regimes of truth from 17th to 20th cents expelled and confined “the mad” along with prostitutes, vagrants, blasphemers, homosexuals, female artists, “savages” etc. – subjects who are constructed as dangerous and deviant Others.
This in turn will prompt questions about gender, sex, “race” and class, about power, authority and control, about definitions of “normal” behavior and social happiness, and about the integrity and disintegration of the self and the body. Here theories by e.g. Derrida, Butler, Greenblatt, Said, Hall, Showalter, Kristeva etc. will show us how Foucault’s concepts were developed and open new dimensions in cultural and media analysis.
Our study of fictional and cultural representations will concentrate on a thematic and a chronological contextualization. We will trace the historical changes of representations of madness by comparing conceptions of 17th, 19th, 20th cents and analyze the decades of the late 20th cent where madness politicized, poetically idealized and deconstructed in new terms - as last refuge from a hostile & alienating capitalist system of commodification and colonization of all sorts. In this context we will explore whether outcast minds and bodies can re-mould institutional settings of confinement and/or re-mould themselves in alternative spaces of liberation.