Mad Speculations

Mad Speculations: Anne Carson’s Messiahs and the Canadian Unconscious gives us a new way of looking at Canadian literature and its unconscious relation to Canadian cultural, political and historical landscapes. Written in accessible language, geared to appeal to undergrad and emeritus alike, it makes intriguing observations and sometimes provocative speculations about what Carson’s mad messiahs can say about the Canadian unconscious.

Author Concetta Principe sidesteps the usual interest in Carson’s postmodern experiments to focus on her engagement with religion and, specifically, the iconic saviour of the past: the messiah. But Carson’s messiah is atypical, a figure of salvation grafted to the Jamesonian revolutionary schizophrenic, its task to deconstruct grand narratives. Do her messiahs do that? Taking a psychoanalytic approach to understanding the function of the messiah in Carson’s texts, Mad Speculations identifies Carson’s very conscious commitment to undermining mental health stigmas. Her messiahs show us an unconscious engagement with Canadian myths as rooted in historical moments such as the Battle of the Plains of Abraham and the trial of Louis Riel. This book also ponders how Carson’s work unconsciously conserves that Canadian cultural tendency to centre the story around the white Anglo-Protestant settler situated in a literary nowhere.

This is the first volume in Reimagining Canada, a new series.

Concetta Principe teaches English Literature and Creative Writing at Trent University, Durham, Canada. Her current scholarship centers on representations of madness in literature, and how that articulates social traumas. Her monograph, Secular Messiahs and the Return of Paul’s Real: A Lacanian Approach (2015) argues that the representation of the messiah in secular culture is symptomatic of a first century trauma.