When “the words don’t fit you”: Reflections on Madness and Nonsense
Divided into three substantial chapters, this dissertation centres on the interconnections of madness and nonsense as two distinct yet intertwined phenomena. The introduction exhaustively analyzes theories on nonsense literature, and the binaric logics that separately structure their respective discursive fields. Using this theoretical history as a launching point, I continue on in the introduction to deconstruct the problematics of analyzing nonsense as a literary technique isolated from the influence of Mad studies.
The first chapter, “The Haunting Ill/ogic of Serial Killers,” takes on the figure of the Western serial killer, and the hermeneutic projects the media take on when reporting on his “senseless” crimes. This chapter argues that the labelling of the serial killer’s crimes as “nonsensical” reveals a particular aesthetic of nonsense that works to associate madness with danger, disease, fear, and hatred within the public imaginary. I critically analyze Lynn Crosbie’s postmodern epistolary novel on Paul Bernardo, Paul’s Case, to investigate this societal and aesthetic dynamic.
In the final chapter, I employ Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing and Emma Donoghue’s The Wonder to consider nonsensical madness within the context of feminine subjectivity. Considering autotheory as a feminist hermeneutic practice leads me to posit a praxis of ethical reading projects that exists outside of Enlightenment principles of objectivity, authorship, and ‘commonsense.’
I close out this project with my own autotheoretical analysis of a diary entry written in the throes of my own madness, and my reflections on my experiences with disability.
Ultimately, this project aims to consider how to engage ethically with nonsensically mad feminine texts, and the ethics of the hermeneutics of mad reading-projects.
McMaster University Doctoral Dissertation
Project Duration:
2016-2022
Craft Your Own Journey: Bridging Grade 8 to 9
In recent years, MCYU has developed pedagogical practices that prioritize students’ experiences. This prioritization of students is part of our emphasis on lifelong learning. Lifelong learning encourages students to take on a more active role in their academic careers, sparked by curiosity and motivation. As it stands, traditional education offers students a passive role in their own education, which is then carried into their occupational and citizenly practices. Indeed, “[t]he more completely they [students] accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is” (Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 72) rather than engaging as responsible citizens and community members. In other words, feeling lost in the educational system, literally or emotionally, is reflected in students’ difficulty adapting to their academic environment.
MCYU thus proposed a project that will increase student motivation and engagement with their academic environment as they transition from middle school to high school. Namely, we suggest leveraging the educational version of the popular game Minecraft, through which students graduating from Adelaide Hoodless Elementary School will build a model of the high school that they will be attending in the new school year, Bernie Custis High School. The high school students will take on many roles through this project, including but not limited to building their high school in their coding and robotics classes; acting as ambassadors in the game; and taking and compiling photographs of the school and the surrounding environment for the high school students to work off of when building the Minecraft model.
This project is generously funded by a grant from the Hamilton Community Foundation.
Project Duration
April 2022 – present
Lifelong Learning in Elementary Education: A Community-based Perspective
Project Duration
July 2022 – present
E. Scherzinger 