Women, Creativity, and Madness February 18, 2010

Is there a connection between madness and creativity? Is madness always an illness—or is it somehow integral to the creative process? The figures of the “mad genius” and the “tortured artist,” after all, hint at a deeper connection between psychospiritual breakdown and artistic achievement than we’d like to admit.

In this lecture, noted scholar and LAS faculty member Dr. Jean Petrolle explores the thin line between madness and creativity, and how madness might actually serve as an engine of creative production, personal survival, and historical change.

Virginia Woolf, Leonora Carrington, and Zelda Fitzgerald are just a few
women whose art, claims Dr. Petrolle, was fueled by their madness.
Please join us for this fascinating and provocative lecture, as Dr. Petrolle
challenges traditional assumptions about mental illness and constructs
an alternate understanding of madness as a viable form of mental labor.

*RSVP to Alexandra Garcia
by Monday February 16th
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- 312 369 8217