Andrés Irigoyen

“The world is divided into those who can sleep and those who can’t,” writes French author Marie Darrieussecq in her 2023 memoir on insomnia, Sleepless. Darrieussecq exemplifies, here, a pithy grandiosity commonly born out of the debilitating state of insomnia. In this course, we will explore the broader history of literary insomnia by focusing on early modern English articulations of sleeplessness alongside their political and intellectual contexts—for instance, classical theorizations of insomnium (sometimes glossed as “nightmare”), melancholy, and the cultural politics of “biphasic sleep.” Students will also be encouraged to think alongside contemporary research and depictions of insomnia, especially as the condition becomes increasingly concerning in our increasingly sleep-deprived world. What might historical and literary study offer ongoing investigations of sleeplessness? From the bewitching “incubus” in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, to Macbeth’s dramatization of "murder'd sleep," to the poetic descriptions of "slumb'rous weight" and hellish restlessness in Milton’s Paradise Lost, this course seeks to uncover insights yielded by various efforts to render in writing this uniquely oppressive state of restlessness.