Lennard J. Davis

Reconsidering Origins: How Novel Are Theories of the Novel?

I feel we have reached a saturation-point currently in academic studies of eighteenth-century fiction—at least in those studies that bear on the history of the genre qua genre. While vast gains have been made—and I truly think the genealogical, historical and bibliographic work done on the early English novel over the past twenty years is one of the great triumphs of twentieth-century literary criticism—we also have reached a kind of intellectual dead end, and like exhausted little Lovelaces with word processors can go no further.

‘Play It Again, Sam, and Again’: Obsession and Art

Working under the premise that disability as an identity category cannot be ignored when addressing the role it plays in the production of art, and utilizing postmodern or biocultural notions of disease, this article traces the history of obsession as disease in five ‘outsider’ artists: Adolf Wölfli, Jay DeFeo, Max Klinger, Mark Lombardi, and Judith Scott. To these ends, this article explores obsession as a culturally acceptable and even desirable disease and one that relies on societal notions of madness, art, and normality. An interpretation of outsider art that takes into account the artist’s mental condition, whether it is to view the art as a ‘product of’ a particular mental condition or as something produced in spite of it, shows that obsession in art is deeply involved in the notion of art itself.

Genius and Obsession: Do You Have to Be Mad to Be Smart?

I intend in this chapter to focus on one specific side of genius—its relation to psychological states and diagnoses, most particularly obsessive thinking and compulsive behaviors. My interest is less to locate madness in any one person and more in observing the change of certain kinds of epistemological categories that reshape the nature of knowledge about madness and genius and the instantiation of that knowledge within culture.