Mad, Bad and Sad:A History of Women and the Mind Doctors

This is the story of how we have understood extreme states of mind over the last two hundred years and how we conceive of them today, when more and more of our inner life and emotions have become a matter for medics and therapists. Examples range from the depressions suffered by Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath to the mental anguish and addictions of iconic beauties like Zelda Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe. From Théroigne de Méricourt, the Fury of the Gironde, who descended from the bloody triumphs of the French Revolution to untameable insanity in La Salpetrière asylum, to Mary Lamb, sister of Charles, who in the throes of a nervous breakdown turned on her mother with a kitchen knife. From Freud and Jung and the radical breakthroughs of psychoanalysis to Lacan’s construction of a modern movement and the new women-centred therapies. Lisa Appignanesi is a London-based novelist, writer and broadcaster. A former university lecturer and Deputy Director of London&#8217;s Institute of Contemporary Arts, she is now the chair of the Freud Museum and President of English PEN, the founding centre of the world association of writers. Her novels include the prize-winning The Memory Man, the psychological thrillers Paris Requiem, Sanctuary, and The Dead of Winter. Her non-fiction ranges from the critically acclaimed family memoir, Losing the Dead to the classic study, Freud&#8217;s Women (with John Forrester). Her books have been translated into many languages. Her book Mad, Bad and Sad has been short-listed for five prizes in the United Kingdom, including the prestigious MIND award and won the British Medical Association Award for the Public Understanding of Science. Her latest book, All about Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion has been published by Virago/Little Brown (2011).Lisa Appignanesi, ‘Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors’, lecture presented at the conference Situating Mental Illness: Between Scientific Certainty and Personal Narrative, ICI Berlin, 28 April 2011, part 1, video recording, mp4, 21:13 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e110428-1

Salman Rushdie and the world picture of Islam

This chapter analyzes Salman Rushdie's agonistic relationship with Islam as theology and as a geopolitical ideal. It explores Rushdie's lifelong engagement with Islam as a world-making power, and the limits and possibilities of reading his works theologically. The chapter argues that the magic realist mode that Rushdie deploys in novels such as The Satanic Verses, Midnight's Children, The Moor's Last Sigh, Shalimar the Clown, and Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights generates a novelistic vision of Islam that simultaneously aspires to a secularization of this embattled religious faith and a return to its philosophical and cultural riches in the late medieval era. It is generative, the chapter avers, to read the Satanic Verses controversy less as a clash between a medieval morality and an enlightened aesthetic than as a fissure between two modes of the aesthetic, one that has the theological as its horizon, and the other a modernist secularism

“Master Race”: Graphic Storytelling in the Aftermath of the Holocaust

This chapter argues that an early graphic story, “Master Race,” published in 1955 by comics artist Bernie Krigstein and scriptwriter Al Feldstein, considered “one of the finest stories ever to appear in the comics form,” anticipated the emergence of the evolving and expanding genre of Holocaust graphic narratives. With memory as the controlling trope, graphic novelists and illustrators, through the juxtaposition of text and image, extend the narrative of the Holocaust into the present, creating a midrashic imperative to reconstruct and reanimate the experience of the Shoah. In recreating moments of traumatic rupture, dislocation, and disequilibrium, graphic narratives contribute to the evolving field of Holocaust representation by establishing a visual testimony to memory