Monomania: The Flight from Everyday Life in Literature and Art - Softcover

Van Zuylen, Marina

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801489865 ISBN 13: 9780801489860

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2005

Synopsis

"This book is about the obsessive strategies people use to keep the arbitrary out of their lives; it is about the fanaticism and intolerance linked to their ideas of perfection and permanence.... Those readers who have brushed against the dangers of the idée fixe, who have come close to surrendering to something or someone diabolically seductive or coercive, will recognize in these characters their own encounter with a dangerously systematized world."―From the introduction.

Monomania explores the cultural prominence of the idée fixe in Western Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Marina van Zuylen revives the term monomania to explore the therapeutic attributes of obsession. She introduces us to artists and collectors, voyeurs and scholars, hypochondriacs and melancholics, whose lives are run by debilitating compulsions that may become powerful weapons against the tyranny of everyday life.

In van Zuylen's view, there is a productive tension between disabling fixations and their curative powers; she argues that the idée fixe has acted as a corrective for the multiple disorders of modernity. The authors she studies―Charles Baudelaire, Sophie Calle, Elias Canetti, George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, and Thomas Mann among them―embody or set in motion different manifestations of this monomaniacal imperative. Their protagonists or alter egos live more intensely, more meaningfully, because of the compulsive pressures they set up for themselves. Monomania shows that transforming life into art, or at least into the artful, drives out the anxiety of the void and puts in its place something so orderly and meaningful that it can take on the aura of a religion.

About this title

About the Author

Marina van Zuylen is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Bard College. She is the author of Difficulty as an Aesthetic Principle.

From the Inside Flap

"Monomania is highly original, deeply learned, intelligent, and thoughtful. It is also engagingly and agreeably written. Marina van Zuylen fruitfully combines psychological and literary issues, achieving a balance between attention to specific authors and a strong central argument. She successfully brings together the inner problematics of literature-the act of writing, the choice of the writing life, the investment in form and style-and the literary imagination of the psychology of human thought and behavior." William Paulson, author of Literary Culture in a World Transformed: A Future for the Humanities

"As we turn these learned pages on modernist fanaticism, obsession, compulsion, and idées fixes, we come to recognize the figure in the mirror: the monomaniac is us. Marina van Zuylen's gentle irony and dry wit make this richly written book a delight to read." Janet Beizer, Harvard University

"This is an enthralling book I found myself monomaniacally lecturing anyone who came near about its ideas. Marina van Zuylen revives a concept of obsession broader than that currently used in psychiatry, and in doing so makes it easier to see what the urge to create literature can have in common with such states as obsessive grief, hypochondriasis, and perfectionism. Monomania is not only a theory-rich delight for students of literature and culture, it has practical implications for clinicians and for any general reader who has felt the seductive tug of being a jealous lover, a tchotchke collector, or a workaholic." Alice Flaherty MD, PhD, Director, Movement Disorders Fellowship, Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, and author of The Midnight Disease : The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain

"This intriguing book is finally about our relationship to time plain time that is at once too dull and too rich for us to bear and how it invests modern art with esthetic urgency. Marina van Zuylen s case studies of notable modernist monomaniacs are poignant in their precise appreciation of the risks and riches of the idée fixe. We come to feel we understand these characters all too well ! A dim but haunting awareness of one s own susceptibility to the "fear of everyday life" grows in the reader , engendering a kind of double reading that performs the very ambiguity of monomania so precisely revealed by van Zuylen s analysis. I read this beautifully written book monomaniacally." Suzanne Guerlac, University of California, Berkeley

Edition details

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801489865
• ISBN 13: 9780801489860
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 252