Mental Illness and Narrative Complexity - by Melanie Kreitler (Hardcover)

About the Book

Analyses the cultural impact of complex narratives on public perceptions of mental illness.

Book Synopsis

Mainstream media's relationship with mental illness is fraught. Deemed to misrepresent and sensationalise non-normative mental states, productions are said to solidify harmful attitudes in their audiences. Over the past two decades, puzzle films and complex TV shows have broken with time-honoured tropes of mental illness, offering alternative ways of visualising and narrating non-normative mental states.

Bringing together cognitive media studies, narrative theory and cultural studies, Melanie Kreitler explores the synergy between complex narrative structures and representations of mental illness. Focusing on US American films and TV shows since the mid-1990s, the book shows how complex productions strategically use their narrative structures to evoke in viewers an experience similar to that of the neuro-non-normative protagonist. Moving beyond the formal characteristics and cognitive effects of narrative complexity, this book argues for the cultural impact that puzzle films and complex television can have on our understanding of mental illness on and off screens.

Review Quotes

This timely book not only identifies and thoroughly theorizes a productive nexus between mental illness and narrative complexity in contemporary film and television, but it also mobilizes its emerging insights to argue for the positive--de-stigmatizing--impacts that engaging with this new breed of perplexing fictions featuring mentally ill characters has on viewers.-- "Miklós Kiss, Associate Professor of Audiovisual Arts and Cognition, University of Groningen"

Melanie Kreitler's book stages an important intervention in debates on narrative complexity. It shows convincingly how complex form is not only a source of attractive puzzlement but a tool of serious cognitive and even phenomenological exploration of mental illness. Developing this argument through a series of case studies drawn from contemporary film and TV, Kreitler overturns assumptions about cognitive approaches to media by demonstrating how cognitive and social meaning-making can work in tandem.-- "Marco Caracciolo, Associate Professor of English, Ghent University"