Dear colleagues,
The issue, to be published before November 30, 2025will consist of three distinct parts:
a) A section monographic
This section is devoted to the theme literature and mental illness.
This issue 33 invites researchers to reflect on the various manifestations of mental disorders in French-speaking literature.
Since Antiquity, madness has fascinated as much as it has worried. Sometimes considered a wise man, sometimes as a creature to be feared and controlled, the madman profoundly marks the literary imagination, nourishing stories and reflections on the human condition and the frontiers of reason over the centuries. Greek tragedy, in particular, offers us striking portraits: Orestes struggles between murderous madness and the quest for redemption, Oedipus must face the madness that arises from the transgression of divine laws. In the 17th century, Don Quixote, an idealistic and grotesque anti-hero, goes mad from too much reading. Nearly two centuries later, the solitude of Rousseau’s walker or the deep melancholy that consumes René bear witness to the growing interest in the pangs of the soul and the various manifestations of human sensitivity. With realism and naturalism, we see the emergence of a literature that examines the disorders of the human psyche. Balzac, Flaubert and Zola depict characters struggling with their inner demons; Baudelaire, through his spleenetic poetry, attempts to exorcise his existential uneasiness in the face of a modern world perceived as hostile. The emergence of the fantastic, which questions the omnipotence of reason, accompanies and nourishes the symbolist and decadent movements featuring characters marked by eccentricity: in Countdown Des Esseintes withdraws from the world into frenzied aestheticism and Hugues Viane sinks into madness after a love tragedy in Bruges-la-Morte. These examples, far from exhausting the richness of the subject, open the way to a profound reflection on the complex links between literature and mental illness, between artistic creation and psychological suffering. However, if literature has addressed the question of psychological disorders for centuries, it is clear that this representation has often taken the form of a reductive idealization, associating madness with genius and heightened sensitivity (Touboul, Crazy stories2020). This conception, inherited from Plato, postulates that the madman, in his clairvoyance, would be capable of apprehending the world differently. However, this idealized vision has contributed to forging a mythologized image of madness and to masking the reality of psychological suffering. It was only from the 1960s, when psychoanalysis entered the public sphere, that we observed a major turning point in the representation of mental illness. The concept of “madness” is gradually disappearing and giving way to a medical approach to mental illness. However, if therapeutic advances have allowed better management of psychological disorders, they have also led to a sometimes reductive vision, which tends to summarize madness as a simple biological dysfunction. This is precisely what Foucault denounces in his work History of madness in the classical age (1961). According to him, the medicalization of madness masks relationships of power and domination, which is why he invites a critical reading of psychiatry and its discourses, as well as a rehabilitation of the words of patients. Although it focuses primarily on deconstructing the mechanisms of exclusion and control that underlie psychiatric discourse, it does not necessarily address the link between madness and the condition of women. However, we cannot ignore that the representation of madness has been marked by gender polarization. The evolution of the literary representation of female madness throughout history deserves particular attention in this sense.
Indeed, literature, as a privileged space of expression, offers a unique perspective on the human experience of madness and allows us to give voice to those whom psychiatry has often reduced to silence. This then becomes the site of a true simulation of their inner states and allows the reader to live vicariously and develop an empathetic understanding – in the sense ofem-pathos“to suffer with” in Latin – about what an individual suffering from mental disorders can feel. Fiction, according to Schaeffer in his work Why fiction? (1999), has the capacity to model situations which are not necessarily validated by reality. The reader, by recognizing himself in the experience depicted (whether representation, testimonial fiction or writing experience as therapy), can thus realize that he is not alone in experiencing such ordeals. This sharing, this putting into words which comes from within, is at the heart of Kristeva’s reflection who affirms that “writing about melancholy would only make sense, for those who are ravaged by melancholy, if the writing came from melancholy” (Black sun1987: 13). This perspective highlights the importance of the direct testimony of patients in the representation of psychological suffering and suggests that literature constitutes a privileged tool for lifting the veil on a reality that is often ignored, even stigmatized. The literary transposition of mental disorder, whether it takes the form of a fictional, autofictive or autobiographical story, facilitates “the transition from private to public” (Tisseron, The shame2014: 9). Even more, today it offers a voice to groups marginalized by social discourse, often confronted with “gendered” diagnoses or cultural stereotypes which influence the perception of their experience. Literature, by allowing them to express themselves, not only explores the pain and suffering linked to mental illness and gives it back its full human dimension, it goes well beyond and offers a profound reflection on the experience of mental illness in all its complexity.
This numberAnnals of French Philology thus proposes to reflect on the representation of mental disorders in French-language literature, exploring both the historical mutations of this representation and its aesthetic and ethical issues.
Here are some possible avenues of study:
- Representations of madness in French-speaking literature.
- Study of emblematic figures of madness in French-speaking literature.
- Analysis of the links between literary creation and mental illness: madness as a source of inspiration or as an obstacle to creation?
- Understanding the relationship between mental illness and the status of women in French-speaking literature.
- Examination of literary devices used to represent mental illness and its effects.
- Approach to the influence of scientific discourses on the representation of mental illness in literature.
- Deconstruction of dominant discourses on mental illness.
- Literature as a space of subjectivity: analysis of autobiographical, autofictional stories, testimonies, etc. on the disease.
b) A selection of varia
This section includes research work on various subjects concerning literature/culture, language/linguistics, reception/translation, etc., in the field of French expression or in its relationship to other languages .
c) A section of reports
Reviews of non-literary works belonging to the same field.
Proposals will be sent through the journal’s website and it will be necessary to create a user account by filling out the form for this purpose.
Waiting for your participation, best regards.
Pedro Salvador Méndez Robles, Director
Elena Meseguer Cloths, Sous-directrice
Lydia de Haro Hernández, Secretary
