Narrating Madness

The Narrating Madness journal comes as a result of a semester-long meditation, inquiry, exploration of the ways in which art (fiction in particular, but also memoir, music, visual art, and film) take us beyond psychiatric diagnosis, to offer the inimitable texture of a particular consciousness in extremis. The class's guiding questions included: How does fiction and other modes of art shift the focus from what is wrong to what is the experience? How does other modes of “narrating madness” give us access to the interior subjectivity of mental illness?

In order to better understand the formal mechanisms fiction, and other art forms, employ as well as their effects, the work featured in the journal analyzes foundational modes of narrating “madness”—case histories and the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders, among them.

The class and journal were made possible by the Long Fellowship, a generous endowment from John and Anne Long.

Written work was inspired by the lives and art of Syd Barrett, Chester Bennington, Kurt Cobain, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walter Gropius, Ernest Hemingway, Yayoi Kusama, Mac Miller, Edvard Munch, Georgia O’Keefe, Sylvia Plath, Jamie Stewart, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Kanye West, Mary Wolstonecraft, and Virginia Woolf.

INTRODUCTION.............................7
Kevin Campbell
Through Ripples and Waves (collage).........10
Letterpress Translation
Silent, But Not...........................................11
Lacheal Martin
Letters........................................................15
Lexi Uhrin
Kurt Cobain on Kurt Cobain....................18
Ellie McKenzie
Property of Sylvia Plath..............................22
Dakota Halloran
Untitled......................................................26
Benjamin Knepp
Free As.......................................................26
Letterpress Translation
Good Morning, Midnight...........................32
Loraine Chow
Skin............................................................33
Christopher Gitelman
Untitled......................................................36
Martin Gehlhar
A Song with Jamie.....................................40
Michael Holland
Rather Existential (collage)........................44
Morgan Marshall-McKinney
Untitled......................................................45
Kevin Campbell
A Walk in the Park....................................49
Letterpress Translation
Sudden Thunderclaps of Fear.....................52
Michael Holland
Walter Gropius: Exile Journal...................53
Alan Segovia-Reyes
Slippery Slope.............................................60
Alex Scott
A Friend is Nothing but a Known Enemy.......64
Andrew Felix Loredo
I Used to Love Kanye................................68
Jack Richards
A Hypochondriac Walks into a Bar...........71
Letterpress Translation
Painted or Real, I No Longer Know Which.......75
Ray Newby
An Encounter.............................................76
Noor Nabulsi
Untitled.....................................................79
Katie Pedneau
Destination................................................82
Madison Smith
Head and Shoulders Above the Rest..........85
Alyssa Pruitt
Untitled.....................................................89
Leigh Cook
Return to Ghost Ranch..............................92
Ray Newby
Untitled (collage)........................................95
Ethan Cheng
Liminal Space............................................96
NOTES.................................................104
CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES...............105