Best Minds: Seeing Allen Ginsberg and Madness Through Different Lenses
April 18, 2023
12:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Location
Institute for the Humanities
Address
Behavioral Sciences Building, 1007 W Harrison Street, Suite 153, Chicago, IL 60607
Registration link:
Calendar
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Institute and Zoom.
Zoom registration link: https://go.uic.edu/AllenGinsberg
A case study of one of the most famous artists in the mid–twentieth century to focus on madness, this symposium explores the complex relationships among mental illness, psychiatry, trauma, poetry, and biography. As a young man, the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) experienced visions and connected with dimensions that most people cannot see. He embraced the madness in and around himself and turned it into powerful poems and cultural explosions. These poems tell varied and evocative stories about madness. In “Howl,” madness is liberation, whereas in “Kaddish,” madness is more injurious, both to those afflicted by mental illness and to their loved ones. Yet despite the suffering madness imposes, Ginsberg demonstrated that madness also creates possibilities in its survivors and witnesses for new meaning, identities, and outcomes.
Featuring panelists:
Ann-Marie McManaman, PhD Candidate, Department of English, University of Illinois Chicago
Bob Rosenthal, UIC alum and author, including Straight Around Allen: On the Business of Being Allen Ginsberg
Michael Schumacher, author of Dharma Lion
Stevan Weine, UIC Professor of Psychiatry and author, Best Minds: How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness
Co-sponsored by UIC Institute for the Humanities, Department of English, and Department of Psychiatry.
Date posted
Mar 2, 2023
Date updated
Mar 29, 2023