‘Eigenschaften ohne Mann’: Madness and

Abstract: In the dominant discourse madness is considered as the opposite of rationality. It concerns the decline, and in extreme cases even the disappearance of rationality in the organization of human conduct and experience. In this article the author explores a more recent, modernist discourse on madness. The new discourse does not understand madness as a decline of rationality, but as an increase or intensification of reason. Madness is not the result of abundance of passions, emotions and vitality but rather of the estrangement from these. This modernist discourse on madness manifests itself in literary novels that magnify the practice of introspection to the most extreme extent. These novels feature a first-person narrator who reflects relentlessly and ruthlessly on his own conduct, feelings and experiences. In these cases the narrative device of first-person narration is symptomatic for a new attitude towards human consciousness and the faculty of reason that substantiates it. In order to better understand the radical effects of introspection through first-person narration, the author focuses on the Dutch novel A Posthumous Confession (Een nagelaten bekentenis) from 1894 b