Sarah Marena Gaspard

Thesis Title: Stranger in Fiction: Mental Illness as (Un)Ethical Alterity in Post-1945 American Fiction

Supervisor: Prof. Michael Whitworth

Research Interests: Representations of mental illness in literature, brain sciences and literature, posthumanism, global modernism, experimental poetics, surrealism, magical realism, critical approaches to speculative fiction, life writing, literature and philosophy, comparative criticism, comparative translation (French and Romanian literature); nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century literature, post-1945 American literature

Doctoral Research: 

My dissertation asserts the imperative of applying Dorothy Hale’s notions of the ethics of alterity to mental illness, and tracing how psychopathological alterity, the state of being different as a result of having a mental illness (or significant psychopathological symptoms), has been depicted in a large number of post-1945 American novels. My research postulates a chronological, aggregative continuity among novels portraying rare and severe forms of mental illnesses by drawing from their knowledge and beliefs about psychopathology rather than from lived experiences of mental illness. By increasingly blurring the lines between metaphorical interpretations of madness and representations of literal symptoms of mental illness, these works contributed to creating and entrenching archetypes of madness which have distorted conceptualizations of psychopathological etiologies, conflated mental illnesses with notions of risk and dangerousness and damaging constructions of masculinity, and fostered negative attitudes toward persons with mental illnesses which endure to this day. My thesis also investigates how narratives centering lived experiences of psychopathology, namely neuronovels evincing endorsement of the diathesis-stress model of illness, allow for more nuanced and insightful fictionalizations of lived experiences of psychopathological alterity – which can engage with the real inflection points affecting the quality of lives intertwined with psychopathological alterity. My research has been funded by a John McCall MacBain Graduate Scholarship at Wadham College.