This is the author's most influential work of literary theory and criticism in which she explores the relations between literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis.

What does it mean to be "mad" in contemporary American society? How do we categorize people's reactions to extreme pressures, trauma, loneliness and serious mental illness? Importantly--who gets to determine these classifications, and why? This book seeks to answer these questions through studying an increasingly popular media genre--memoirs of people with mental illnesses. Memoirs, like the ones examined in this book, often respond to stigmatizing tropes about "the mad" in popular culture and engage with concepts in mental health activism and research. This study breaks new academic ground and argues that the featured texts rethink the possibilities of community building and stigma politics. Drawing on literary analysis and sociological concepts, it understands these memoirs as complex, at times even contradictory, approaches to activism.

At the turn of the millennium, narrative works by Latin American women writers have represented madness within contexts of sociopolitical strife and gender inequality. This book explores contemporary Latin American realities through madness narratives by prominent women authors, including Cristina Peri Rossi (Uruguay), Lya Luft (Brazil), Diamela Eltit (Chile), Cristina Rivera Garza (Mexico), Laura Restrepo (Colombia) and Irene Vilar (Puerto Rico). Close reading of these works reveals a pattern of literary techniques--a "poetics of madness"--employed by the writers to represent conditions that defy language, make sociopolitical crises tangible and register cultural perceptions of mental illness through literature.