'Mad': cultures, histories, phantasies, imaginaries of mental distress
| Module title | 'Mad': cultures, histories, phantasies, imaginaries of mental distress |
|---|---|
| Module code | EAS3511 |
| Academic year | 2024/5 |
| Credits | 30 |
| Module staff | Dr Michael Flexer (Convenor) |
| Duration: Term | 1 | 2 | 3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Duration: Weeks | 11 |
| Number students taking module (anticipated) | 20 |
|---|
Module description
This module doesn’t intend to tell the definitive intellectual story of ‘insanity’. Rather, together, you will creatively explore, inhabit and construct a dissonant cacophony of portraits of ‘madness’. Through workshops, lectures, seminars, film screenings, creative writing and arts sessions, you will rhizomatically re-examine and re-interrogate what it means to be a ‘mad’ self in the world.
This module is suitable for anyone with an interest in transgression, trauma, queerness, gender, psychiatry, social control, telepathy, time travel, mad studies, neurodivergence, feminist speculative fiction, hysteria, medical humanities, post-structuralism, hearing voices, film-making, pathography, surrealism, b-movies or bondage.
This module is recommended for those interested in interdisciplinary work; it fosters clear pathways to critical and theoretical research across literature, art history, psychology, philosophy, film and screen studies, and social studies.
Module aims - intentions of the module
You will cover a critical history of psychiatry from its pre-psychiatric origins in alienism and 18th century forms of carceral social control, through to contemporary mad activism. Simultaneously, you will get parallel and alternative histories, including an overview of Soviet psychiatry, and post-colonial formulations, as generative ripostes to the euro-centric narrative of orthodox medicine.
Across the module, you will get to explore some of the wilder and more unruly cultural representations of and responses to unusual human experiences and phenomenology, across a range of media including film, literature, life-writing, medical accounts, visual and plastic arts, critical and post-structuralist thinking. In addition, you will develop creative skills – with skill sessions on e.g. film making, collaborative writing, digital storytelling – and be able to express and extend your thinking about ‘madness’ using these new tools.
Sessions will be led by lecturers with a strong research track record in ‘mad’ studies, and you will benefit from research-enriched learning throughout. Seminars, workshops and skill sessions will be highly participatory and democratic, and you will develop your skills in communication, collaboration, creativity and cooperation. You will be able to actively contribute to the shape of the module and the course of the learning, e.g. through collaborative co-writing of marking criteria, and supporting the learning of your peers by feeding your own research and creative work into discursive and open sessions. This will be an exciting experiment in radical democratic pedagogy.
Through the module you will develop a broad, heterodox conceptualisation of ‘madness’ and mental distress, discovering and often creating the knowledge and skills that would prepare you for employment in a range of healthcare, wellbeing and therapeutic career settings, for doing mental health research or activism, or just for being an open-minded, inclusive and compassionate human being.
Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)
ILO: Module-specific skills
On successfully completing the module you will be able to...
- 1. Demonstrate a critical understanding of a range of theories relating to mental distress or madness, including but not limited to the orthodox Western psychiatric medical model, anti-psychiatry and critical psychiatry movements, mad studies and mad activist responses, and intersectional critical accounts especially those inflected by queerness, gender and post-colonialism
- 2. Engage critically and creatively with complex, heterogeneous and varied cultural representations of mental distress and madness and relate these to the problems of living in our current conjuncture
- 3. Demonstrate a deep understanding of the intersectional nature of madness and its interrelations with questions of class, race, gender, sexuality and (post)colonial identities and experiences
ILO: Discipline-specific skills
On successfully completing the module you will be able to...
- 4. Demonstrate an advanced ability to critically analyse across different media (including film, literature, life-writing, computer games, music, poetry, visual and plastic arts, performance) and across different discourses (literary, sociological, medical, political activism etc.)
- 5. Create challenging, imaginative and original responses to pre-eminent social, cultural and political problems using a range of creative digital and analogue tools including video and audio technology, digital storytelling techniques, creative writing, visual and plastic arts skills
- 6. Reflect productively on your own creative practice and the potential for exploring and developing knowledge through practical, creative methodologies
ILO: Personal and key skills
On successfully completing the module you will be able to...
- 7. Think carefully and compassionately about the lived experiences of others, and particularly those in crisis
- 8. Think through doing, using creative methodologies to explore issues and solve problems
- 9. Engage with and respect very different phenomenological account, life experiences and views from your own in a way that is constructive, compassionate and collaborative
Syllabus plan
The syllabus will be rhizomatic, rather than linear, in structure and will be constructed around six interwoven contiguous strands, each week’s lecture/workshop and seminar will draw across these strands, throwing material into ahistorical, surprising and creative dissonances:
- A critical history of psychiatry from pre-psychiatric conceptualisations of the 18th century (e.g. Haslam, Pinel) through to contemporary mad activist and service-user led formulations
- Transgression and deviance – madness and its entanglements with queerness, feminism, masochism and sexual violence (e.g. the Papin Sisters, Freud, Lacan)
- Logics of trauma and systems of oppression – an examination of madness as an instrument and expression of state and other forms of violence and control (e.g. Vonnegut, Foucault, Caouette)
- Alternative realities, otherworld histories and parallel timelines – madness as an escape from capitalist realism and logics, with a particular focus on surrealist and outsider art, speculative feminist fiction and other esoterica (e.g Carrington, Le Guin, Piercy)
- Outsider voices – an international, intersectional riposte to euro-centric psychiatric and critical psychiatric epistemologies (e.g Weijun Wang, Spielrein, Vygotsky, Kusama)
- Demos and praxis – students will be doing and making throughout, with workshops, creative skills sessions, screenings and assessments to make a creative piece (film, visual or plastic arts, creative writing) and a reflective journal exploring ‘madness’
Learning activities and teaching methods (given in hours of study time)
| Scheduled Learning and Teaching Activities | Guided independent study | Placement / study abroad |
|---|---|---|
| 42.5 | 257.5 | 0 |
Details of learning activities and teaching methods
| Category | Hours of study time | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Scheduled Learning and Teaching | 16.5 | 11 x 1.5-hour Lecture / Workshop |
| Scheduled Learning and Teaching | 16.5 | 11 x 1.5-hour Seminars |
| Scheduled Learning and Teaching | 7.5 | 3 x 2.5-hour Screenings |
| Scheduled Learning and Teaching | 4 | 2 x 2-hour Skill Sessions |
| Guided Independent Study | 66 | 11 x 6-hour Seminar and lecture preparation |
| Guided Independent Study | 191.5 | Reading, research, essay writing and creative assessment |
Summative assessment (% of credit)
| Coursework | Written exams | Practical exams |
|---|---|---|
| 100 | 0 | 0 |
Details of summative assessment
| Form of assessment | % of credit | Size of the assessment (eg length / duration) | ILOs assessed | Feedback method |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Creative piece | 30 | 2000 words or equivalent for an individual project | 1-3, 5, 7-9 | Written feedback with opportunity for tutorial follow-up |
| Reflective Journal | 30 | 2000 words | 1-3, 6, 7-9 | Written feedback with opportunity for tutorial follow-up |
| Essay | 40 | 2500 words | 1-4, 7, 9 | Written feedback with opportunity for tutorial follow-up |
Details of re-assessment (where required by referral or deferral)
| Original form of assessment | Form of re-assessment | ILOs re-assessed | Timescale for re-assessment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Creative piece (2000 words or equivalent for individual project) | Creative piece (2000 words or equivalent for individual project) | 1-3, 5, 7-9 | Referral/Deferral period |
| Reflective journal (2000 words) | Reflective journal (2000 words) | 1-3, 6, 7-9 | Referral/Deferral period |
| Essay (2500 words) | Essay (2500 words) | 1-4, 7, 9 | Referral/Deferral period |
Indicative learning resources - Basic reading
- Beresford and Russo (eds.) The Routledge International Handbook of Mad Studies, (New York: Routledge, 2022).
- Carrington, Leonora, The Hearing Trumpet (London: Penguin, 2005)
- Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R Lane (London: Continuum, 2004
- Edwards, Rachel, The Papin Sisters (Oxford: OUP, 2001)
- Fanon, Frantz, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967)
- Guattari, Emmanuelle, I, Little Asylum (Cambridge, MA: Semiotexte, 2014)
- Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar Book III: The Psychoses, 1955-56 (trans. Russell Grigg). (London: Routledge, 1993)
- Laing, RD, The Divided Self (London: Penguin, 1990)
- Piercy, Marge, Woman on the Edge of Time (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1976)
- Weijun Wang, Esmé The Collected Schizophrenias (London: Penguin, 2019)
Indicative learning resources - Other resources
Core viewing (selection of which will be screened for the group) will include:
- A Page of Madness (Teinosuke Kinugasa: Japan, 1926)
- Glen or Glenda (Ed Wood: USA, 1953)
- Les dentes du singe (René Laloux: France, 1961)
- Les moindres des choses (Nicolas Philibert: France, 1997)
- Tarnation (Jonathan Caouette: USA, 2003)
| Credit value | 30 |
|---|---|
| Module ECTS | 15 |
| Module pre-requisites | None |
| Module co-requisites | None |
| NQF level (module) | 6 |
| Available as distance learning? | No |
| Origin date | 01/02/2024 |
| Last revision date | 01/02/2024 |
