{"product_id":"madness-and-modernism-insanity-in-the-light-of-modern-art-literature-and-thought-9780465043125","title":"Madness And Modernism: Insanity In The Light Of Modern Art  Literature  And Thought","description":"\u003cp\u003eA stunning revelation of the eerie likeness between schizophrenic insanity and the sensibility of modern art  literature  and thought  Madness and Modernism presents a vivid and highly original portrait of the world of the madman  along with a provocative commentary on modernist and postmodernist culture. Sass  a clinical psychologist  explores the bizarre experiences of schizophrenia (and related conditions) through a comparison with the works of various artists and writers  including Franz Kafka  Paul Valery  Samuel Beckett  Alain Robbe-Grillet  Giorgio de Chirico  and Marcel Duchamp  and by considering the ideas of philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche  William James  Martin Heidegger  Michel Foucault  and Jacques Derrida. The similarities between madness and modernism are striking: defiance of authority and convention; an extreme  often dizzying relativism  which can culminate in paralysis; nihilism and all-embracing irony; a tantalizing  uncanny  but always frustrating sense of revelation; obliteration of standard forms of time and narrative; pervasive dehumanization; and disappearance of external reality in favor of the omnipotent ego or  alternatively  dissolution of all sense of selfhood. This rigorously argued  gracefully written book offers a startlingly new vision of schizophrenia  an illness long recognized as the greatest challenge to psychiatric or psychological understanding. Conventionally seen as a loss of rationality  perhaps involving a return to some infantile or bestial condition  schizophrenia  according to Sass  is better understood as  in a sense  a disease of hyperrationality  with detachment from action  emotions  and the body and entrapment in forms of acute self-consciousness and heightened awareness. Sass refuses to romanticize the schizophrenic as a heroic rebel  mystic  or passionate Wildman  arguing instead that this condition echoes many of the most alienating aspects of modern life. In an epilogue and appendix  he considers whether modern culture might actively contribute to the genesis or shaping of schizophrenic forms of pathology  and he discusses the possible role of abnormalities of the brain.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45279820808245,"sku":"ByrdShop_0465043127","price":147.12,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780465043125.jpg?v=1780612047","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/madness-and-modernism-insanity-in-the-light-of-modern-art-literature-and-thought-9780465043125","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}