Introductory description

N/A.

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Autumn Term
Week One: Introduction.
Week Two: The Looney Bin
Week Three: Therapeutic Communities
Week Four: Drugs and Treatments
Week 5: Race and Class
Week Six: Reading Week
Week Seven: Bodies
Week Eight: Mania
Week Nine: Bureaucracy
Week Ten: Essay Seminar and Small Group Tutorials. No Reading.

Spring Term

Week One: Delusions
Week Two: Realities
Week Three: Suicide
Week Four: Trauma
Week Five: Stigma
Week Six: Reading Week
Weeks Seven: Presentation Preparation
Weeks Eight, Nine and Ten: Presentations.

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Will have developed an advanced understanding of the relationship between artistic practices and madness through historical, sociological, theoretical, philosophical, and literary research. They will have a keen sense of the ethical demands of representing health, illness, and pathology, and demonstrate a thoughtful and imaginative response to these challenges in the presentation and essay. They will have acquired a wide ranging knowledge of the practices and practitioners working in this area. Students will also have gained a rigorous understanding of key concepts and movements covered in the module such as trauma, anti-psychiatry, and auto-pathography.
• Students will develop their skills and academic training in the course of this module. They will further develop their ability to engage critically and analytically from different theoretic perspectives. They will explore theoretical concerns through practice, and vice versa, and will be able to synthesise findings in practical and written tasks. By the module’s conclusion students will have furthered their ability to interpret research and creative practice.
• Students will have developed the advanced ability to utilise research tools and to articulate the relationship between critical theory and creative practice. They will also have enhanced their library and IT skills via detailed independent research. They will also be able to contribute research to small groups in effective presentations, to evaluate visual evidence and to develop advanced confidence in the ability to communicate complex material.
• Students will have developed a number of personal skills in the course of this module. These include using personal initiative, identifying and evaluating personal learning strategies that are self critical as much as self reflective. Students will also develop group cooperation skills, including the ability to give and receive constructive critical feedback. Finally, they will develop their the ability to think laterally and demonstrate originality in problem solving, to express and communicate creative ideas and images, and the ability to initiate and sustain creative work, both group and solo.

Indicative reading list

Jeff Adams, Documentary Graphic Novels and Social Realism (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008)
Richard P. Bentall, Madness Explained: Psychosis and Human Nature (London; Penguin, 2004)
Emile Durkheim, Suicide: A Sociology (London: Routledge, 1952)
Michel Foucault, 'Madness and Civilization (London: Routledge, 2001)
Arthur W Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, Ethics (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995)
Erving Goffman, Asylums (London: Penguin, 1961)
Tom Heller et al (eds) Mental Health Matters: A Reader (Buckinghamshire: Open University Press, 1996)
Gail Hornstein, Agnes’ Jacket: A Psychologist’s Search for the Meanings of Madness (New York: Rodale, 2009)
Kay Redfield Jamison, Night Falls Fast (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2000)
E. Ann Kaplan, Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Abingdon: Routlegde, 1990)
R D Laing, The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise (London: Penguin, 1967)
Darian Leader, Strictly Bipolar (London: Penguin, 2012)
Mary Luckhurst, 'On Infamy and Dying Young' in Theatre and Celebrity 1660-2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005)
David B Morris, Introduction and Chapter One in The Culture of Pain (London: University of California Press, 1991)
Roy Porter, The Faber Book of Madness (London: Faber and Faber, 1991)
Roy Porter, Madness: A Brief History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)
Nicholas Ridout, Theatre & Ethics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009)
Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture 1830-1980 (London: Virago, 1987)
Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness, (London: Harper Row, 1972)
Fintan Walsh, ‘Therapeutic Dramaturgies’ in Theatre & Therapy (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012)

Research element

Students are required to undertake independent critical research and have the opportunity to develop their own research essay projects as part of the assessments.

Interdisciplinary

The module is interdisciplinary insofar as it is concerned with the intersections of the arts and health. Students will encounter critical reading from the humanities but also from medicine, psychiatry, and psychology.

International

The primary texts from this module are taken from the UK and the USA.

Subject specific skills

Students will gain experience in critical debate and argument. They will engage in high-level reading from plural disciplines and learn to synthesise and present their findings. They will develop their writing and presentation skills. They will attain a keen understanding of artistic form.

Transferable skills

Key transferable skills gained include developing an argument, presentation skills, comprehension, advanced level writing, research skills.