Michel Foucault takes the reader on a serendipitous journey in tracing the history of madness from the 16th to the 18th centuries. Utilizing original documents, the author recreates the mood, the place, and the proper perspective in the history of madness. Madness or folly is viewed as part of the human condition and to be examined and illuminated through one of its many facets. At the end of the Middle Ages madness was seen either as a tragic or comic phenomenon. The Renaissance, with Erasmus' Praise of Folly , demonstrated how imagination and its derivatives were to thinkers of that day. The French Revolution introduced the so-called medical approach. Madness is a ubiquitous phenomenon that has common roots not only in medicine but in poetry and tragedy. Shakespeare brilliantly describes psychological phenomena with even greater clarity than Tuke or Wills. The author weaves a fascinating history showing the changing pattern of

Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason.

In the context of scholarly re-evaluations of James Joyce’s relation to the literary revival in Ireland at the start of the twentieth century, this essay examines the significance of W.B. Yeats to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It traces some of the debates around Celtic and Irish identity within the literary revival as a context for understanding the pre-occupations evident in Joyce’s novel, noting the significance of Yeats’s mysticism to the protagonist of Stephen Hero, and its persistence in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man later. The essay considers the theme of flight in relation to the poetry volume that is addressed directly in the novel, Yeats’s 1899 collection, The Wind Among the Reeds. In the process, the influence of Yeats’s thought and style is observed both in Stephen Dedalus’s forms of expression and in the means through which Joyce conveys them. Particular attention is drawn to the notion of enchantment in the novel, and its relation to the literature of the Irish Revival. The later part of the essay turns to the 1899 performance of Yeats’s play, The Countess Cathleen, at the Antient Concert Rooms in Dublin, and Joyce’s memory of the performance as represented through Stephen towards the end of the novel. Here, attention is given to the mystical and esoteric aspects of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, aspects that the novel shares with the poetry and drama of Yeats.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

the social power of collective labour. This placed a limit on the activities of the unions and also incorporated them as part of the administrative process. In the very period in which labour-power was being fashioned for the market, capital was equally being given a new legal form (corporate form) through which capitalist expansion could take place. The entrance of the working class into civil society and the state formed the basis for the emergence of administrative mechanisms for the subsumption of struggle. For Neocleous, by subsuming struggle, political administration is working-class power post festum; working-class political victories captured and formalised at their moment of triumph. Born of the struggle of the working class these structures are then left with the task of administering that same class, a task performed in relation to both collective organisations of the working class and its decomposed elements known as ‘citizens’. The importance of the links between law and administration is drawn out in Chapter 5, where the arguments developed in earlier chapters come to fruition. By exploring the period in which the working class is incorporated into the body politic in Britain, Neocleous explores the period in which administration becomes politicised, being used by the state for the threefold purpose: the constitution of legal subjectivity, the fashioning of the market and the subsumption of struggle. Much more could be said about this book’s insights. One point of criticism, however, is that Neocleous argues for an approach in which both the base-superstructure and the state-civil society couplets are to be used together. But it is not clear how such a combination is to be articulated. There is also the potential in such a combination for state and class to become externalised and, at times, a sense of this externalisation comes across in the narrative. Nevertheless, this clearly is an important and stimulating book and deserves to widely read.

The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering

Foucault and the Political

The Decay of Lying

This thesis looks to restore Michel Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia to its literary origins, and to examine its changing status as a literary motif through the course of twentieth-century fiction. Initially described as an impossible space, representable only in language, the term has found a wider audience in its definition as a kind of real place that exists outside of all other space. Examples of these semi-mythical sites include the prison, the theatre, the garden, the library, the museum, the brothel, the ship, and the mirror. Here, however, I argue that the heterotopia was never intended as a tool for the study of real urban places, but rather pertains to fictional representations of these sites, which allow authors to open up unthinkable configurations of space.

Specifically, I focus on three writers whose work contains numerous examples of these places, and who shared the circumstance of spending the majority of their lives in exile: James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, and W.G. Sebald. In each case, I argue that these sites figure the experience of exteriority constituted by exile, providing these authors with an alternative perspective from which to perform a particular kind of contestation. In Ulysses, I argue, they allow Joyce to interrogate the notion of a unified Irish identity by bringing into question the space that constitutes the common locus upon which the nation is founded. In Nabokov’s Ada, they help the author to create a world that transcends the discontinuities of his transnational biography, but also serve to contest this unreal world. In Sebald’s fiction, finally, we find a critique of Foucault’s concept. In relation to the Holocaust, he questions the validity of the heterotopia by bringing into doubt the equation of space and thought upon which it is established.

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Kelvin Knight

Papers

Real places and impossible spaces : Foucault's heterotopia in the fiction of James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, and W.G. Sebald