Paranoia in Modernity

[Dave Monroe]

Farrell, John.  Paranoia in Modernity: Cervantes to Rousseau.
   Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2007.

"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

http://books.google.com/books?id=FeseQP6RtRAC&dq