Inspiring Minds seeks to broaden awareness and impact of graduate student research, while enhancing transferable skills. Students were challenged to describe their research, scholarship or creative activity in 150 or fewer words to share with our community.
Sublime Schizoanalysis: Literary Madness and the Modernist Aesthetic
Socrates called poetry divinely inspired madness; today, madness is considered mental illness. Yet literature still derives its power to create fictional worlds from inspired “madness.” I study “literary madness”, specifically, how schizophrenia, the symptom of the modern age, becomes a linguistic and aesthetic model for the experimental styles of Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, and Faulkner. Meaning “split mind,” schizophrenia reflects the fractured psyche and the doppelganger. Lacking definitive etiology and symptomology, schizophrenia became the “sacred symbol” of psychology and literature, fascinating critical theorists. My methodology combines psychoanalysis and deconstruction: where the uncanny shadow-self meets the infinitely mirroring abyss of language. Literature is lucid madness – the antidote to a world gone mad. Literary madness communicates an ecstatic experience beyond reason and representation, accessing generative and transformative consciousness. The mirror-world of madness transfigures the abject, liminal, transgressive, and divine. This new sublime is the fountainhead of creativity and the aesthetic dimension.
Andrew Pudlak
PhD candidate, English
Faculty of Arts and Humanities - Western University
Supervisor
Kate Stanley (https://www.uwo.ca/english/people/stanley.html)
Andrew is a PhD candidate in English, specializing in 20th century American and British Literature. His interdisciplinary research investigates the intersections of literature, aesthetics, philosophy, and psychology. He seeks to develop a greater understanding of how imagination and creativity work on a fundamental level, transforming everyday experience into artistic vision. He hopes to contribute to the medical and health humanities by examining how literature informs our views of mental illness. Andrew has a background in creative writing, and has been a teacher of literature, rhetoric and composition, and film studies. He is a contributor to the Literary Review of Canada.
You can connect with Andrew via email at apudlak@uwo.ca.
View Andrew's work as it appears in the Inspiring Minds Digital Collection: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/inspiringminds/573/.