Sanity and Madness in Literature From Ancient Greece to the Renaissance

3 units

We will consider explicit and implicit models of mental life, motivation, and action in works by authors studied in 201C. We will investigate how concepts related to madness are formulated and regulated in these literary texts and in the societies that produce them, and we will read scholarship from the 19th through 21st centuries that has debated the scale and scope of irrationality in ancient, medieval, and early modern cultures.