Paranoia and Modernity

[Dave Monroe]

Farrell, John.  Paranoia and Modernity: Cervantes to
Rousseau.
   Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2005.

"Don Quixote is the first great modern paranoid
adventurer. . . . Grandiosity and persecution define
the characters of Swift’s Gulliver, Stendhal’s Julien
Sorel, Melville’s Ahab, Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man,
Ibsen’s Masterbuilder Solness, Strindberg’s Captain
(in The Father), Kafka’s K., and Joyce’s
autobiographical hero Stephen Dedalus. . . . The
all-encompassing conspiracy, very much in its original
Rousseauvian cast, has become almost the normal way of
representing society and its institutions since World
War Two, giving impetus to heroic plots and
counter-plots in a hundred films and in the novels of
Burroughs, Heller, Ellison, Pynchon, Kesey, Mailer,
DeLillo, and others."—from Paranoia and Modernity

Paranoia, suspicion, and control have preoccupied key
Western intellectuals since the sixteenth century.
Paranoia is a dominant concern in modern literature,
and its peculiar constellation of
symptoms—grandiosity, suspicion, unfounded hostility,
delusions of persecution and conspiracy—are nearly
obligatory psychological components of the modern
hero.

How did paranoia come to the center of modern moral
and intellectual consciousness? In Paranoia and
Modernity, John Farrell brings literary criticism,
psychology, and intellectual history to the attempt at
an answer. He demonstrates the connection between
paranoia and the long history of struggles over the
question of agency—the extent to which we are free to
act and responsible for our actions. He addresses a
wide range of major authors from the late Middle Ages
to the eighteenth century, among them Luther, Bacon,
Cervantes, Descartes, Hobbes, Pascal, La
Rochefoucauld, Swift, and Rousseau. Farrell shows how
differently paranoid psychology looks at different
historical junctures with different models of agency,
and in the epilogue, "Paranoia and Postmodernism," he
draws the implications for recent critical debates in
the humanities.

http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4389

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