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Monomania and Perpetual Motion: Insanity and Amateur Scientific Enthusiasm in Nineteenth-Century Medical, Scientific and Literary Discourse

Duffy, Larry (2010) Monomania and Perpetual Motion: Insanity and Amateur Scientific Enthusiasm in Nineteenth-Century Medical, Scientific and Literary Discourse. French Cultural Studies, 21 (3). pp. 155-166. ISSN 0957-1558. (doi:10.1177/0957155810370381) (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided) (KAR id:30309)

The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided.
Official URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0957155810370381

Abstract

This article traces the cultural history of a recurrent association made in nineteenth-century French medical, scientific and literary texts between variants of 'monomania' - a broad term denoting obsessive fixation on a particular object in a subject presumed otherwise sane - and amateur scientific enthusiasm, specifically for perpetual motion, a phenomenon long acknowledged as impossible, and metonymy for similar chimera. A reading of alienist texts in conjunction with literary texts - emblematically, Zola's La Bete humaine, which links human and thermodynamic dysfunctionality - reveals that a specifically homicidal monomania is closely linked with the specific delusion that perpetual motion is possible, at the very moment when monomania is superseded, or considerably modified, by degeneration theories, when the degenerative nature of thermodynamic engines becomes widely accepted, and when disciplinary power - in Foucauldian terms - supersedes sovereignty.

Item Type: Article
DOI/Identification number: 10.1177/0957155810370381
Uncontrolled keywords: amateur science; cultural history; Michel Foucault; monomania; perpetual motion; psychiatry; Emile Zola
Subjects: D History General and Old World > DC France
P Language and Literature > PQ Romance Literature > PQ1 French Literature
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Arts and Humanities > School of Culture and Languages
Depositing User: Fiona Symes
Date Deposited: 28 Aug 2012 15:31 UTC
Last Modified: 16 Nov 2021 10:08 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/30309 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

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