A Poetics of Neurosis: Narratives of Normalcy and Disorder in Cultural and Literary Texts

»[The book] fulfills its goal, and with gusto - it disposes of diagnostic exactness to embrace terminological vagueness yet successfully diagnoses many fundamental ailments and discomforts of our present-day culture.« Marija Spirkovska, KULT_online, 60 (2019)

While psychiatry and the neurosciences have dismissed the concept of neurosis as too vague for medical purposes, in recent years literary studies have adopted the term by virtue of its abstractness. This volume investigates the verbalization of neurosis in literary and cultural texts. As opposed to the medical diagnostics of neurosis in the individual, the contributions focus on the poetics of neurosis. They indicate how neuroses are still routinely romanticized or vilified, bent to suit aesthetic and narrative choices, and transfigured to illustrate unresolved cultural tensions.

Frontmatter 1 Table of Contents 5 Acknowledgements 7 Introduction: A Cultural History of Neurosis, From Diagnostics to Poetics 9 The Lure of Space: Psychasthenia as Mnemonic Device in Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days 37 Disintegrated Selves: Dissociative Disorders and Colonial Anxiety in Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book 55 Reading Rap with Fanon and Fanon with Rap: The Potential of Transcultural Recognition 75 Neoliberalism, Terror, and the Etiology of Neurotic Citizenship 95 Pegida as Angstneurotiker: A Linguistic Analysis of Concepts of Fear in Right-wing Populist Discourses in German Online Media 115 Ain't It Funny? Danny Brown, Black Subjectivity, and the Performance of Neurosis 137 Neurosis as Resilience in Jhumpa Lahiri's Diasporic Short Fictions 159 Allegories of Pathology: Post-War Colonial Expatriates and Imperial Neurosis in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night and Derek Walcott's Omeros 179