Writing and Madness is Shoshana Felman's most influential work of literary theory and criticism. Exploring the relations between literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis through brilliant studies of Balzac, Nerval, Flaubert, and James, as well as Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida, this book seeks the specificity of literature in its relation to what culture excludes under the label "madness." Why and how do literary writers reclaim the discourse of the madman, and how does this reclaiming reveal something essential about the relation between literature and power, as well as between literature and knowledge?
Every literary text continues to communicate with madness with what has been excluded, decreed abnormal, unacceptable, or senseless by dramatizing a dynamically revitalized relation between sense and nonsense, reason and unreason, the readable and the unreadable. This revelation of the irreducibility of the relation between the readable and the unreadable constitutes what the author calls la chose litteraire the literary thing."
- ISBN10 0801493943
- ISBN13 9780801493942
- Publish Date 1 September 1986
- Publish Status Out of Stock
- Out of Print 18 December 2007
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Cornell University Press
- Format Paperback
- Pages 256
- Language English