The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the Podgolomorate Network and LIT Hub Radio.

Hello, we begin today's episode with a pair of quotes.

Quote number one.

Without something to belong to, we have no stable self.

And yet total commitment and attachment to any social unit implies a kind of selflessness.

Our sense of being a person can come from being drawn into a wider social unit.

Our sense of selfhood can arise through the little ways in which we

resist the pull. Our status is backed by the solid buildings of the world, while our sense of personal identity often resides in the cracks.

Here is quote number two.

In her magnificent biography of Here is quote number two.

In her magnificent biography of Virginia Wolf, author Hermione Lee notes that the fear of incomprehensible links madness and writing.

I think this explains my sense of self in those days, the

limits of my ability to communicate, which is why my writing was fueled by desperation and madness too.

That it would be impossible to explain to anyone for anyone to understand the depth of my

feeling.

This sense of being so far out. This was why I went mad, I think, if that is what I did."

End quote.

The first quote was from Canadian American Irving Goffman's book, Assilums, essays on the condition of the social situation of mental patients and other inmates. And the second quote was from the book,

Committed on Meaning and Mad Women by Suzanne Scanlon, who went through that Goughmanian search for selfhood as she

journeyed in and out of what was then called the State Psychiatric Institute on West 168th Street in Upper Manhattan.

Suzanne has written about that journey including what some have called an

ode to the writers that history has deemed mad women.

...