Reducing Creativity to a Psychiatric Syndrome: On the Pathologization of Female Poets

October 17th, 2024. Public reading of my latest collection of poems, Permettez-moi de palpiter [Allow Me to Pulsate][3]. Open discussion with the audience. […] Suddenly, in a eureka moment, an elderly man speaks up: “You have Cotard’s syndrome. You must have. All the symptoms you describe match up.” This anecdote – whose significance is, in fact, more than anecdotal – gives me the opportunity to revisit a centuries-old tradition in patriarchal discourse of pathologizing female poets.

Cultivating Life After Death

Avril Tynan // “Death is not an event in life,” wrote philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in the early 20th century, “We do not live to experience death” (6.4311). Of course, Wittgenstein could not know that 100 years later we would be living through a pandemic, but if Covid-19 has taught us anything, it is that death…

Review – Living with Buildings

Emily Wheater // It was a dark, and extremely wet London evening, when I sought shelter in the Wellcome Collection in London a few weeks ago. Like many of Britain’s museums, it is free to enter (though you are free to spend money in the bookshop), and it is dry (despite the sodden Britons). And…