Universität Wien

124220 SE Cultural and Media Studies Seminar (2017W)

'Madness and Civilisation': Representations of Western Exclusionary Practices, Cultural Discontent, and Civil Disobedience in Theory, Media, and Literary Contexts

11.00 ECTS (2.00 SWS), SPL 12 - Anglistik
Continuous assessment of course work
Moodle

Registration/Deregistration

Note: The time of your registration within the registration period has no effect on the allocation of places (no first come, first served).

Details

max. 18 participants
Language: English

Lecturers

Classes (iCal) - next class is marked with N

  • Monday 09.10. 15:30 - 17:00 Seminarraum 6 Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-O1-22.A
  • Monday 16.10. 15:30 - 17:00 Seminarraum 6 Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-O1-22.A
  • Monday 23.10. 15:30 - 17:00 Seminarraum 6 Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-O1-22.A
  • Monday 30.10. 15:30 - 17:00 Seminarraum 6 Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-O1-22.A
  • Monday 06.11. 15:30 - 17:00 Seminarraum 6 Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-O1-22.A
  • Monday 13.11. 15:30 - 17:00 Seminarraum 6 Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-O1-22.A
  • Monday 20.11. 15:30 - 17:00 Seminarraum 6 Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-O1-22.A
  • Monday 27.11. 15:30 - 17:00 Seminarraum 6 Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-O1-22.A
  • Monday 04.12. 15:30 - 17:00 Seminarraum 6 Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-O1-22.A
  • Monday 11.12. 15:30 - 17:00 Seminarraum 6 Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-O1-22.A
  • Monday 08.01. 15:30 - 17:00 Seminarraum 6 Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-O1-22.A
  • Monday 15.01. 15:30 - 17:00 Seminarraum 6 Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-O1-22.A
  • Monday 22.01. 15:30 - 17:00 Seminarraum 6 Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-O1-22.A
  • Monday 29.01. 15:30 - 17:00 Seminarraum 6 Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-O1-22.A

Information

Aims, contents and method of the course

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>/i> (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, Felman, Hall, Showalter 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.

Assessment and permitted materials

Regular participation
Oral presentation (15 mins)
Short reflections
Participation in plenum discussions
Final paper (for BA students: 8000-10 000 words; MA students: 6500-8000 words)
Detailed info-files and topic-sheets will be provided at the beginning and during the semester.

Minimum requirements and assessment criteria

Examination topics

Reading list

Theoretical primary and secondary texts will be available on moodle and/or in the library/English department/Handapparat.

The following texts/films will be analyzed:
Hamlet. (Ophelia)/ King Lear. (Shakespeare, 1606) --> géneral references
"The Lady of Shalott" (Tennyson, 1833)
"The Yellow Wallpaper" (Perkins Gilman, 1892)
Heart of Darkness (Conrad,1899)
"Howl" (Ginsberg, 1955)
Plath, Sylvia. Poetry (+ context: Bell Jar 1950s)
Slaughterhouse 5 (Vonnegut,1969) in context with: The Wall (Pink Floyd,1982)
Surfacing ( Atwood, 1973)
Natural Born Killers (Stone, 1994)
Fight Club (Palahniuk, 1994/ Fincher, 1999)
4.48 Psychosis (Kane, 2000)
The Knife. Full of Fire. (2016) Short Film/Music Video
Sia. Big Girls. / Chandelier. (2015/6) Music Video
--> General references will be made to numerous other texts/films.

Association in the course directory

Studium: UF 344, BA 612, MA 844;
Code/Modul: UF 4.2.4-322; BA 09.2; MA6, MA7
Lehrinhalt: 12-0405

Last modified: Mo 07.09.2020 15:33