BRIEFING FOR A DESCENT INTO HELL: MADNESS AS A LITERARY MOTIF IN WORLD LITERATURE
BRIEFING FOR A DESCENT INTO HELL: MADNESS AS A LITERARY MOTIF IN WORLD LITERATURE

Summary/Abstract: The article explores man’s eternal fascination with madness or the presumption that a person acts, behaves beyond the rules of the community, of the norm. The work explores the brief literary history of mania, of divine madness as it appears in antiquity. In the Elizabethan era, Shakespeare depicts the world as a stage and the human characters and their behaviours as important pieces of the puzzle that Freud would later describe in his work dedicated to the human psyche. The article is named after Doris Lessing’s novel, Briefing for a Descent into Hell, a novel that imagines the fantastical "inner-space" life of an amnesiac, a man supposed to be mad. Madness and moreover its depiction are mere performances of imagination on our part, because all literary endeavours on depicting madness are attempts to understand a universe, a reality, a pathology so different from our reality or what we consider to be real.

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