Category: 34.2 Writing the Mind

Mark Fisher’s theoretical work has provided an important foothold for social and political critique of current events. Ranging from the study of artistic productions to that of literary and philosophical case studies, Fisher has highlighted the hegemonic role of capitalist realism as an ideological force that flattens all manifestations, cultural and material, on the temporal… Continue reading 34.2 | Review: Postcapitalist Desire

J. B. Mohaghegh’s Omnicide: Mania, Fatality, and the Future-in-Deliriums is an anthology of lyrical and narrative productions of Middle Eastern origin, giving expression to the different manias that lodge in the subjective psyche. The set of these obsessions, for the author, tend to define a desire that is both destructive and self-destructive, which is directed… Continue reading 34.2 | Review: Omnicide

Anna Poletti is Associate Professor of English Literature and Culture at Utrecht University and recently published their monograph, Stories of the Self: Life Writing after the Book. As a scholar of autobiography, they consider forms of “self-life-inscription” (Poletti 8) outside of the book, and the importance of considering the materiality and transmediality of such autobiographical… Continue reading 34.2 | Kelly van der Meulen & Kees Müller

This paper analyzes how Brittle (sammehsayum 2012), a popular work of fanfiction for the TV show Supernatural (2005-2020), relates to the Supernatural canon and to dominant cultural narratives on masculinity and eating disorders as identified by Bordo (1993) and Contois (2020). In its representation of protagonist Sam Winchester’s eating disorder, Brittle engages with the dominant… Continue reading 34.2 | Julia Neugarten

This article problematizes the discursive ways mental disorders are perceived through a close reading of Joshua W. Cotter’s comic Driven by Lemons, which is a diary Cotter kept shortly after his diagnosis with bipolar II. The way he depicts this journey draws out, what Jean-François Lyotard termed the “figure,” which emphasizes destruction over structure. By… Continue reading 34.2 | Maico Mariën

“Matrifocal (Dis)ease and (Re)membering in Amy Kurzweil’sFlying Couch” provides an interdisciplinary reading of Kurzweil’sgraphic memoir that combines space and place theory with comics scholarship, trauma studies, and family systems theory. Through tightly pairing the act of remembering with illustrations of putting bodies back together again on the page, Kurzweil grapples with matrilineal trauma connected to… Continue reading 34.2 | Marybeth Ragsdale-Richards

Florian Zeller’s play The Son (2019) explores how parents may be complicit in destabilizing their children’s mental health, in addition to the impact that children who do not conform to ideal norms have on the lives of their parents. Through its cryptic dialogue, the text suggests that depression is a state that exists partly beyond… Continue reading 34.2 | Ben Screech

In a world that is thoroughly defined by the material, FRAME’scurrent issue examines the ways in which literature can represent themind and its different manifestations in all its complexity. Aimingto democratise understandings of the human psyche, ‘Writing the Mind’ encourages transmedial explorations of the mental realm, while being acutely aware of the danger of dualism… Continue reading 34.2 | Foreword