Ilana, thank you for writing this. While reading, what I also thought about was how literature using the environment as a site for "madness." What I mean isn't necessarily the social environment (how society restricts or expands our understanding of sanity/insanity, and subsequently how that's expressed in literature), but the role the physical environment (built or natural) plays in our understanding of that line. I'm thinking about things like "jungle fever" in Heart of Darkness; I'm thinking about Ahab in Moby Dick (sure, his complete obsession/possession of the whale is "insane," but one also gets a sense that the ocean itself plays a role in that madness); I'm thinking of the absurdist Japanese drama/novel, Woman in the Dunes, where sanity/insanity are reversed in the environment: the teacher, stuck in a dune, slowly becomes "sane" (equates to acceptance & complacency) in an absurd (thus "maddening"?) physical environment and situation.
Speaking of built environments, what about Kafka's bureaucratic labyrinths, or modern day corporate office/work place novels that equally seem to influence the madness the characters express and/or feel?
Like you, I don't have any cohesive theory, just some thoughts. In the end, I'm stuck in a three million square mile open air insane asylum called the United States of America, suspended and floating on a giant rock in the middle of nowhere headed toward oblivion (trust me, that's more comforting than one might think to me).
Ilana, thank you for writing this. While reading, what I also thought about was how literature using the environment as a site for "madness." What I mean isn't necessarily the social environment (how society restricts or expands our understanding of sanity/insanity, and subsequently how that's expressed in literature), but the role the physical environment (built or natural) plays in our understanding of that line. I'm thinking about things like "jungle fever" in Heart of Darkness; I'm thinking about Ahab in Moby Dick (sure, his complete obsession/possession of the whale is "insane," but one also gets a sense that the ocean itself plays a role in that madness); I'm thinking of the absurdist Japanese drama/novel, Woman in the Dunes, where sanity/insanity are reversed in the environment: the teacher, stuck in a dune, slowly becomes "sane" (equates to acceptance & complacency) in an absurd (thus "maddening"?) physical environment and situation.
Speaking of built environments, what about Kafka's bureaucratic labyrinths, or modern day corporate office/work place novels that equally seem to influence the madness the characters express and/or feel?
Like you, I don't have any cohesive theory, just some thoughts. In the end, I'm stuck in a three million square mile open air insane asylum called the United States of America, suspended and floating on a giant rock in the middle of nowhere headed toward oblivion (trust me, that's more comforting than one might think to me).