PERSONALITY DISORDER IN AFRICAN FICTION By

International Journal of Linguistics and Language, 2012

A lot of research works by Africans and non-Africans alike have discussed various themes and preoccupations in African literature as they relate directly to the African world view since one of the goals of literature is to chronicle and enunciate its people's cosmology. However, one theme in African literature which has not been given due attention by research works despite the availability of literature in the area is the perspectives of Africans on the concept of insanity and insane people. This paper, as a result, attempts to examine the concept of madness/ insanity and mad characterization in African literature with focus on the nature, status, and functions of the mad/ insane characters as observed in the chosen texts. Eseoghene in Isidore Okpewho's The Last Duty, Orukorere in J. P. Clark's Song of a Goat and Madman in Chinua Achebe's collection of short stories titled Girls at War and other stories-the first story in the collection titled Madman is our focus-are the characters whose speeches and actions are the concern of this work. The paper reasons that these characters, ostensibly insane as they appear, are indeed character metaphors of courage, hidden wisdom, prophetic voices and certain degree of sanity. In view of the above position, the paper concludes that the African writers and indeed the African cosmology see mad people as possessing a degree of sanity and certain epistemological endowments beyond the apparent façade of pure insanity.

2012

Most of us spend our lives waiting for those exciting moments that make us feel truly alive.

2016

Examiner/examined, analyst/analysand, subject/object, sane/mad, science/art: the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature appears to conform to this binary logic, with the first term in each set clearly privileged over the second. The realm of the literary is populated with an impressive assortment of mad characters and mad authors: killers, junkies, drunkards, the paranoid, the depressed, the suicidal, the abandoned or the simply alienated. Literature inhabits and is inhabited by the pathological, or so it must have seemed to the armies of psychoanalytic critics who repeatedly turned to it. We seek to deconstruct this particular binary view of literature-as-madness, psychoanalysis-as-saneness by showing how a critic's preoccupation with the pathology of an author can sometimes expose his/her own unconscious complexes, desires or fears. With this in mind, we thus momentarily turn the examiner into the examined.

In their emphasis on the sociological method, the phenomenon of psychosis is a tool that has been consistently employed by African playwrights in their allegorical analyses of our continent’s ills especially in the post-colonial period. Two of the most prominent examples are by two of the continent’s leading playwrights: John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo in Song of a Goat (1964) and Wole Soyinka in The Beatification of Area Boy (1995). A third is Fidelis Okoro in Joys of War (2000). Guided by the psychoanalytic and postcolonial theories, it is the position of this research that these three plays allegorise different aspects of the story of postcolonial Africa and that their location of inquisitive psychotics at their respective cores allegorises the place of the probing African writer as the locus of societal analysis through the three stages employed by this study: Africa’s relationship with the West, Africa’s troubles within its constituent states, and the writer’s place in Africa. The three plays could, in theory, constitute a trilogy due to their being facets of a single concern, namely, the peculiar situation of the African writer in highlighting the continent’s historical ills.

Romanian Journal of English Studies, 2013

The present paper discusses the types, functions and limitations of the madness narrative, a particular type of text dealing with a popular research topic: mental instability, within the larger contexts of women’s autobiographical writing and illness-based writing. The overview aims to provide the theoretical framework necessary for the further analysis of specific madness narratives.

˜The œCreative launcher, 2023

This article is an attempt is to understand insanity, melancholy, madness, sorrow as the offshoots of gender discrimination and stereotype roles prevailing in the society. Such issues, being claimed as the subject of clinical psychology, have been analyzed popularly from the Freudian point of view, but in this paper, the researcher endeavors to philosophize the issue of insanity and attempts to offer a kind of solution to the problem which seems more ethical and moral in nature. The researcher proposes 'philosophical counseling' as an active practice to avoid such mental conditions. Since the study focuses on the gender-biased understanding of insanity, researcher will choose only women as the case of study. It is usually suggested by the scholars such as Terry Eagleton (in Literary Theory: An Introduction

English Academy Review, 2010

Taking her cue from the University of KwaZulu-Natal's critical psychology unit, Flora Veit-Wild endeavours to fill a similar gap in African literature: '[W]ithin the field of scholarship on African literature, the theme of madness and its relationship to writing has been little explored ...

This research paper explores six pieces of literature chief among the novels and short stories which openly deal with insanity; One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) by Ken Kesey, The Sound and the Fury (1929) by William Faulkner, Macario from El Llano en Llamas (1953) by Juan Rulfo, La Noche del Loco from La Noche (1943) by Francisco Tario, Of Mice and Men (1937) by John Steinbeck and La Gallina Degollada from Cuentos de Amor de Locura y de Muerte (1917) by Horacio Quiroga.In this paper there is a list of categories in which every fiction is framed. Such categories are Dionysian madness, insanity and alienation and lastly Insanity and innocence. Keywords : Insanity, Dionysian madness, alienation, innocence

Scrutiny2, 2019

The Zomba Mental Hospital in Malawi has gained mythical connotations in the history of its existence, both through its association with political detention and through serving as a reminder for the sane of the precariousness of their assumption of mental well-being. Some of the discourse surrounding the institution, and indeed surrounding the question of madness, has found its way into literary works. Within African literature, a fair share of attention has been devoted to exploring madness as presented in prose-such as novels and short stories-with a focus on the ties of madness to colonialism and patriarchy. However, there is a very evident gap in the literature when it comes to exploring madness as it has been presented in African poetry. This article contributes to the conversation by drawing on three Malawian poets-Bright Molande, Francis Moto, and Jack McBramsfocusing specifically on their poems about madness. Drawing on perspectives from disability studies, as well as Foucauldian insights into madness, the article examines how the poets expose the subversive nature of madness, showing how its portrayal in the poetry questions assumptions of sanity. This is pursued by investigating the encounter between madness and sanity, the source and nature of the fear of madness among the sane, and the portrayal of the mental asylum as a space of confinement.

2014

This paper deals with six narrative and dramatic texts about mental illness in order to analyse in how far readers can feel cognitive empathy with characters whose impaired reasoning and emotional responses are radically at odds with their own experience. The works of Gilman, Kesey, Bennett and Penhall, though diverse in style and content,tend to solicit sympathy for their disabled characters by casting them as victims of an oppressive environment, deflecting the focus from the portrayal of a deranged mind to social criticism. Society and the way it treats mental illnessis made to seem much madder than the patients themselves. Autors like McCabe and Kane, who mirror the thought processes and emotional confusions of their psychotic characters in detail, elicit pity for their protagonists and produce intense emotional disturbance in the reader, but audiences may find it difficult to put themselves empathetically into the shoes of figures about whose unpredictable responses they can fo...