A Thousand and One Thresholds of Ardor: A Critical Analysis of Female Madness in 21st-Century Western Literature
| dc.contributor.author | Ellman, Hillary Brooke | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2020-09-29T22:01:04Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2020-09-29T22:01:04Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2020 | |
| dc.description | 51 pages | |
| dc.description.abstract | This project examines depictions of female psychological difference in two Western contemporary primary texts: Elyn Saks’ 2007 memoir, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness (Harper & Row, New York) and Mira T. Lee’s 2019 novel, Everything Here is Beautiful (Penguin Books, New York). Following a detailed discussion of the historical conversation surrounding female literary madness, I argue, using an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, that recent narratives by women portray feminine malaise in a manner which subverts dominant hegemonic discourse by challenging the third-person social and clinical practices that currently exist to define and contend with gendered and psychological categories of identity. In specific, I demonstrate how primary texts, in both memoir and novel form, destabilize the “speech/noise” binary, a cultural practice which French philosopher, Jacques Ranciere, outlines and censures in his 1999 text, Disagreement (Regents of the University of Minnesota). The “speech/noise” binary is the process by which society discredits any discourse that deviates from the dominant mode of communication, defining it as unintelligible “noise” rather than rational “speech.” In addition to exploring the discrepancies between first-person and outside understandings of madness, I also examine the complexities of identity, emphasizing the fruitfulness of using literary analysis to understand the role of sociocultural factors beyond gender and psychological condition, such as race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, in the development of ideological understandings and literary narrations of human experiences. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1794/25742 | |
| dc.language.iso | en_US | |
| dc.publisher | University of Oregon | |
| dc.subject | Literature | en_US |
| dc.subject | Feminism | en_US |
| dc.subject | Madness | en_US |
| dc.subject | Contemporary Works | en_US |
| dc.subject | Novel | en_US |
| dc.subject | Literary Madness | en_US |
| dc.subject | Theory | en_US |
| dc.title | A Thousand and One Thresholds of Ardor: A Critical Analysis of Female Madness in 21st-Century Western Literature | |
| dc.type | Thesis/Dissertation |