Monomania
Related: obsession - mania - eccentricity - escapism - addiction - creativity
Monomania: The Flight From Everyday Life In Literature And Art (2005) - Marina Van Zuylen
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Definition
In psychiatry, monomania (from Greek monos, one, and maniac, mania) is a type of paranoia in which the patient has only one idea or type of ideas. Emotional monomania is that in which the patient is obsessed with only one emotion or several related to it; intellectual monomania is that which is related to only one kind of delirious idea or ideas.
In colloquial terms, the term monomania is often attached to subcultures that to the general public appear esoteric. However, the differences between monomania and passion can be very subtle and difficult to recognize. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomania [Nov 2006]
Monomania: The Flight From Everyday Life In Literature And Art (2005) - Marina Van Zuylen
First sentence: "The early twentieth-century physician, philosopher, and psychiatrist Pierre Janet (1859-1947) could be renamed the great poet of obsessive disorders..." (more)
Monomania explores the cultural prominence of the idée fixe in Western Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Marina van Zuylen revives the term monomania to explore the therapeutic attributes of obsession. She introduces us to artists and collectors, voyeurs and scholars, hypochondriacs and melancholics, whose lives are run by debilitating compulsions that may become powerful weapons against the tyranny of everyday life.
In van Zuylen’s view, there is a productive tension between disabling fixations and their curative powers; she argues that the idée fixe has acted as a corrective for the multiple disorders of modernity. The authors she studies—Charles Baudelaire, Sophie Calle, Elias Canetti, George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, and Thomas Mann among them—embody or set in motion different manifestations of this monomaniacal imperative. Their protagonists or alter egos live more intensely, more meaningfully, because of the compulsive pressures they set up for themselves. Monomania shows that transforming life into art, or at least into the artful, drives out the anxiety of the void and puts in its place something so orderly and meaningful that it can take on the aura of a religion. -- from the publisher
Monomania word sample from Jahsonic.com:
The She Devils remains Pierre Lous' most intense, claustrophobic work; a study of sexual obsession and monomania unsurpassed in its depictions of carnal excess, unbridled lust and limitless perversity. --Kathleen Murphy on Pierre Louÿs (1870 - 1925) It's this very monomania that gives [Sade's] works their coldly granitic fascination, page after page of mechanized sexual debasement hewn out like so many identical slabs of stone, and it's also why he can disturb the most open-minded reader. -- Bruce Reid on Quills (2000) - Philip Kaufman Poe's tales, of course, fall into several classes; [the] third group deal with abnormal psychology and monomania in such a way as to express terror but not weirdness. --Lovecraft via Supernatural Horror in Literature (1924-1927)
On idée fixe:
An obsession or fixed attitude. The 19th century French composer Hector Berlioz used the term to denote a musical idea (normally a short melodic phrase), representing something or someone extra-musical, that was subject to limited development during the course of the work; very similar to Richard Wagner's use of so-called leitmotifs.
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