Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought

The similarities between madness and modernism are striking: defiance of authority, nihilism, extreme relativism, distortions of time, strange transformations of self, and much more. In this book, Louis Sass, a clinical psychologist, offers a new vision of schizophrenia, comparing it with the works of such artists and writers as Kafka, Beckett, and Duchamp and philosophers including Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida. It provides a portrait of the world of the madman, along with a commentary on modernist and postmodernist culture.