UCLA

At the start of the “post-truth” era, women writers in post-colonial France and post-Soviet Russia were searching for a strategy to respond to the crises of authority and authenticity unfolding around them. Linda L�, Gis�le Pineau, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, and Anna Starobinets exploit the ambiguity of literary madness to destabilize traditional sites of knowledge and work towards new conceptions of truth. All four women’s works have traditionally been approached as narratives of trauma, detailing the ravages of mental illness or cultural upheaval. This dissertation argues that they instead work to expose the irreconcilability of medical, sociological, and spiritual authorities, forcing readers to constantly question who (if anyone) can be considered trustworthy and which (if any) perspective can be declared reliable. The texts provide fictional reference points, like intertextual allusions and meta-literary framing, as the surest way for readers to anchor their assumptions. Linda L�’s autofictional text Calomnies and Gis�le Pineau’s autobiographical novel Chair Piment depict a Francophone world wracked with social fractures in the wake of decolonization and economic crisis: amidst the splintering chaos, literature acts as a tenuous web holding contradictory discourses in suspension. Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s novella Vremia Noch’ and Anna Starobinets’ novella Perekhodnyi vozrast instead depict literature as a veil cast over the hollowed-out remnants of authority after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, each of these women’s works rejects any assumed conflation between knowledge and truth, and by extension an unquestioned relationship between authority and authenticity. In the wake of its successful dismantling of these sites, mad literature serves as a surprisingly promising step towards truth, rather than an obstacle to reaching it. Drawing on French philosopher Alain Badiou’s conception of the void as no-thing, I argue that madness in Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s oeuvre both models Badiouan subjectivization and encourages readers to approach truth as an axiomatic intervention. Utilizing Russian existentialist Lev Shestov’s work, I then approach Gis�le Pineau’s continuous engagement with despair and insanity as a way to reintroduce singularity and contingency to reader consciousness, pitting them against the constrictive forces of necessity. Both Petrushevskaya and Pineau tackle madness as something to be passed through via literature; L� and Starobinets, by contrast, follow philosopher Gilles Deleuze in their encouragement of endless engagement with dis-order. Linda L� draws on Russian muse Marina Tsvetaeva in her search for adequate truths, transforming autofiction into a schizo-analytic process. Anna Starobinets instead draws on Franz Kafka to trace contemporary obstacles to true Deleuzian creation, illustrating the infinite potentialities of meaning. In all four cases, mad literature is a crucial tool for producing truths that come before or outside frameworks of knowledge — its authenticity not yet, and perhaps never, authorized.