“The Madhouse” by Francisco Goya [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons So brilliant: an implicitly ironic but outwardly straight-faced reading of the DSM-5 as a dystopian horror novel, complete with a quasi-Ligottian assessment of the book’s narrative voice and view of humanity. Great dystopia isn’t so much fantasy as a kind of estrangement or dislocation from…
Tag: madness
Shirley Jackson: Witchcraft, madness, and the uncanny dangers of writing
From a long and uncommonly engrossing essay by Victoria Best at Open Letters Monthly about the relationship between life, art, madness, and the occult in the work and person of Shirley Jackson: She believed [writing] had a protective function, too, a kind of mental hygiene that allowed her to be herself: “The very nicest thing…