Literary Scholars and Critics

Laure Murat

Prof. Laure Murat’s next book, The Man Who Mistook Himself for Napoleon , to be published byGallimard, focuses on the relationship between political history and madness. She will present this new project in Paris this Fall and at the Modern Language Association in December 2009.

« Ambitious monomania », « césarite », « revolutionnary neuroses », « morbus democraticus » : from 1789 to 1871, French physicians have coined many « diseases » related to political convinctions. How can one read today this epistemological construction ? Is French history legible through registers of lunatic asylums and how ? Based on unpublished archives and material of the 19th Century, The Man Who Mistook Himself for Napoleon, explores the relationship between ideology and pathology, attempting to understand how political events such as revolutions and advent of new systems of government affect mental health and/or can be represented as delirious in the French psychiatrist and literary discourse. Rather than denouncing wrongful confinements, this study aims to analyze what is at stake in the intertwined discourses of madness, psychiatry and political theory.

Laure Murat is also involved in gender studies. On October 14, 2009, she is going to participate in a round table at the Centre Georges Pompidou, related to the exhibition elles@centrepompidou, a display of works by women artists in the museum collections. On October 16, she will give a lecture on the ‘third sex’, the topic of her last book, in a seminar on History of Sexualities at the University Paris I/Panthéon-Sorbonne. She is also currently working on an essay, applying queer theory to animation movie, entitled « Queering Ratatouille and (possibly) French cuisine », to be published in an edited volume.