Monomania

"As we turn these learned pages on modernist fanaticism, obsession, compulsion, and idées fixes, we come to recognize the figure in the mirror: the monomaniac is us. Marina van Zuylen's gentle irony and dry wit make this richly written book a delight to read." -- Janet Beizer, Harvard University
"In the same way as Rene Girard analyzed the structure of mimetic desire in his groundbreaking Deceit, Desire and the Novel of 1965, Marina van Zuylen constructs the history of what seems at first an obsolete psychological affliction by ordering a series of case studies into a teleological march through time—from Flaubert's to ours. She reactivates notions that had fallen into oblivion and in so doing proposes an entirely new reading of monomania as a symptom, or rather a coherent set of symptoms, of modern life." -- Yve-Alain Bois, Harvard University
"Monomania is a rich and compelling study of an often misunderstood condition.... Marina van Zuylen's interest lies in analyzing monomania as an all-too-common yearning for absolutes that transcends the nineteenth century and permeates literature, art, and life even today. Her book offers a fascinating philosophical and psychological consideration of the desire to organize one's existence around a stable ideal, and the corresponding anxiety that life is otherwise meaningless or empty. Drawing on various sources—case studies, letters, and biographies in addition to fiction, philosophy, and art—van Zuylen illuminates monomania's role in a range of practices and predilections. Myriad idées fixes coalesce around the drive to establish the coherence that life lived freely fails to provide. The desire unites the artist fleeing reality for abstraction, the nineteenth-century housewife seeking a master in her mate, the hypochondriac focusing ever inward on his or her body, and even the academic obsessed with productivity." -- Laura Spagnoli, French Forum, Fall 2007
"Monomania is highly original, deeply learned, intelligent, and thoughtful. It is also engagingly and agreeably written. Marina van Zuylen fruitfully combines psychological and literary issues, achieving a balance between attention to specific authors and a strong central argument. She successfully brings together the inner problematics of literature-the act of writing, the choice of the writing life, the investment in form and style-and the literary imagination of the psychology of human thought and behavior." -- William Paulson, author of Literary Culture in a World Transformed: A Future for the Humanities
"This intriguing book is finally about our relationship to time—plain time that is at once too dull and too rich for us to bear—and how it invests modern art with esthetic urgency. Marina van Zuylen's case studies of notable modernist monomaniacs are poignant in their precise appreciation of the risks and riches of the idée fixe. We come to feel we understand these characters all too well! A dim but haunting awareness of one's own susceptibility to the 'fear of everyday life' grows in the reader, engendering a kind of double reading that performs the very ambiguity of monomania so precisely revealed by van Zuylen's analysis. I read this beautifully written book monomaniacally." -- Suzanne Guerlac, University of California, Berkeley
"This is an enthralling book—I found myself monomaniacally lecturing anyone who came near about its ideas. Marina van Zuylen revives a concept of obsession broader than that currently used in psychiatry, and in doing so makes it easier to see what the urge to create literature can have in common with such states as obsessive grief, hypochondriasis, and perfectionism. Monomania is not only a theory-rich delight for students of literature and culture, it has practical implications for clinicians—and for any general reader who has felt the seductive tug of being a jealous lover, a tchotchke collector, or a workaholic." -- Alice Flaherty MD, PhD, Director, Movement Disorders Fellowship, Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, and author of The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain