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TAUGHT IN ENGLISH. Since Plato, inspiration and madness have been understood as closely related, if not identical, terms. For Plato, the experience of beauty awakens a memory in the soul that leads the soul to take flight and to abandon the earth. This understanding of enthusiasm returns in accounts of poetic inspiration in the twentieth-century from Freud’s writing on Leonardo and Karl Jaspers’s study Strindberg and Van Gogh, Swedenborg and Hölderlin (1922) to Blanchot’s Space of Literature (1943) and Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1970). In this course we will read theoretical works by Plato, Freud, Binswanger, Jaspers, Blanchot, Deleuze, and Foucault and “inspired” literary writing by Hölderlin, Dickinson, Baudelaire, Melville, Kafka, Walser, Schreber, Artaud, and Borges. To what extent is inspiration mad and how does madness color insight into the phenomenon?