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Welcome!!
To avoid any possible confusion, it is very important to point out that the course entitled LOVE AND MADNESS IN FILM AND LITERATURE is not a course about madness, nor is it about love. It is about both -- as we understand love, madness, and ourselves via film and literature.
It is designed to be an interdisciplinary course that draws from the humanities, film studies, literature, literary theory, cultural and gender studies which has as its goal the analysis of the following question:
Why do films and literature that deal with what we classify as "madness" and "love" appeal to us so much?
In answering this question, we hope to gain the following:
1. insight into the human condition;
2. a better understanding of how individuals perceive themselves as existing in the world;
3. an idea of how we tend to characterize relationships between people who exhibit love, madness, or a combination of the two;
4. an understanding of how we tend to use films and literature to explain relationships, and even to predict outcomes;
5. insight into some of the persistent myths and archetypes that shape our way of knowing ourselves and others;
6. explanations for the behaviors that seem to beset entire communities (folie a deux madness; passionate uprisings to defend the helpless, etc.)
7. an understanding of how films and literature use "madness" and "love" to explore the nature of human invention, success, vision, entrepreneurship, and creativity on all levels.
We use film and literature as a way to explore the human condition. Further, we have to consider what happens as we watch a film. Many argue that we project ourselves onto the screen. We trade places with the actors for the duration of the film; thus we live vicariously, we experience their realities as though they were our own, we assume a new identity, and we validate / reinforce our previously existing beliefs.
Films that deal with love and madness tend to explore extremes. They test the boundaries of consciousness, of morality, of courage. In analyzing our responses to such films, and the reasons for the attraction, we may find that such films and literature do the following:
1. They affirm that the irrational exists in our psyches and influences us, perhaps even more than pure "reason" or "rationality;"
2. They satisfy a drive or a need we're not getting in our life;
3. They allow us to trangress, even if only through the imagination, and in a tightly controlled environment of pure fantasy;
4. They provide voyeuristic pleasure as we are titillated by the "other;"
5. They help explain what is happening in society;
6. They function as cautionary tales;
7. They give us an idea of how transformation and transcendence can take place in one's life;
8. They give us tools to deal with life issues.
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