Disability and Madness on Screen

Prof. Cornelia Wächter, Di (4) VMB/0302/U

Regular sessions: 20.10.26-1.12.26, Tuesdays 4 DS

Student conference: 20.-21.2.27, 9:00-16:30

Please note: Due to my own disability, this course will have to take place on Zoom. You will find the link under "Link list". However, the classroom remains booked and available for use. Should you need access, please ask one of my colleagues to unlock it for you.

This course explores how disability and madness are negotiated in contemporary narrative culture. I use the term “madness” as “refer[ring] to a range of experiences –thoughts, moods, behaviours – that are different from and challenge, resist, or do not conform to dominant, psychiatric constructions of ‘normal’ versus ‘disordered’ or ‘ill’ mental health” (Liegghio 2013). Rather than viewing physical and mental differences through a biomedical framework - as individual ‘problems’ - we will investigate how cultural texts are enfolded into systems of normative representation and sociocultural exclusion. We will begin with an overview of the moral, medical, and social models of disability and madness. We will then read and discuss theoretical texts on, for instance, the visual rhetorics of staring, the prosthetic reliance of narrative on disability, crip nationalism, disaster capitalism, and the popular mediation of madness. This theoretical framework will be paradigmatically applied to the British television film Then Barbara Met Alan (2022).

This seminar culminates in a student conference on 20-21 February 2027. It is an integral part of this course, so only enrol if you can make those dates. At this conference, students will present a conference paper (like a short term paper, but presented to an audience) on a (British) narrative representation of their choice – such as a film, TV show, or novel – applying the theoretical frameworks introduced in class.