Description
Book Synopsis What does it mean to be mad in contemporary American society? How do we categorize people''s reactions to extreme pressures, trauma, loneliness and serious mental illness? Importantly--who gets to determine these classifications, and why?
This book seeks to answer these questions through studying an increasingly popular media genre--memoirs of people with mental illnesses. Memoirs, like the ones examined in this book, often respond to stigmatizing tropes about the mad in popular culture and engage with concepts in mental health activism and research. This study breaks new academic ground and argues that the featured texts rethink the possibilities of community building and stigma politics. Drawing on literary analysis and sociological concepts, it understands these memoirs as complex, at times even contradictory, approaches to activism.
Trade ReviewNo one has written such an extensive study of the subject covered herein." —G.T. Couser, professor of English and founder of disability studies emeritus, Hofstra University
"A significant contribution to the study of madness." —Dr. Peter Morrall, visiting associate professor in health sociology, University of Leeds, UK
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- Introduction
- Writing about Madness: Terminology
- The Stigma of Madness
- The Confessional Mode
- Part I: Self-Fashioning as Normal (Again) and as Mad
- Dealing with Discredit
- Chapter One. Self-Fashioning as Normal (Again)
- Relativization and Claims to Essential Normalcy
- Normalization and Depathologization
- Narratives of Transformation
- Religious Conversion Narratives
- Secular Conversion Narratives
- Narratives of Self-Making
- Chapter Two. Self-Fashioning as Mad
- Complicating Madness and Identity Politics
- The Humor in Madness
- Madness as Suffering
- Madness and Gothic Horror
- Part II: Objective and Subjective Truth
- Chapter Three. Producing Objective Truth
- Writing for "the Own": Literacy and Meaning-Making
- Writing for "Normals": Reliability and Voyeuristic Pleasures
- Writing for Psychiatrists: Self-Specification and Case Histories
- Chapter Four.Producing Subjective Truth
- The Use of Pronouns and Narrative Situations
- Defamiliarized Narratives
- Defamiliarizing Uses of Language
- Confessing Madness: Truth and Sexuality
- Madness as Abject Corporality
- Conclusion
- Chapter Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
