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“Psychopathology seems to be one of the central themes of contemporary literature,” Evelyne Keitel observes in the Introduction to Reading Psychosis (p. 1) and she then proceeds to raise a number of crucial questions about this new literary genre. “What is the nature of such literature, the form of its texts, their effect on the reader, their function within the sociocultural context?” The question that most intrigues her is this: insofar as psychosis is the experience of losing touch with reality and undergoing psychic fragmentation, how can a literary text “overcome certain specific limits of verbalization, while at the same time allowing for a psychotic experience to be communicated?” (p. 3).
In her efforts to answer these questions, Keitel steers away from most of the traditional and contemporary schools of psychoanalytic literary criticism on the grounds that they impose dubious conclusions about unconscious human forces onto a literary text. She questions whether literary texts ever reflect the personality profiles of their authors, doubts whether fictional