Kathryn Cai As a recent New York Times article notes, apocalyptic narratives—in the form of natural disasters and conflict with North Korea, for instance—and survivalist responses to it are on the rise in popular US discourses.[1] This tongue-in-cheek article notes that survivalism is gaining traction in young, affluent culture, “where the bombproof bunker has replaced…
Tag: body
Hypochondria and the Struggle for Control
Sneha Mantri One of the best-known literary depictions of hypochondria is Molière’s medical play, Le Malade imaginaire, which is occupied with the struggle for power between Argan, the titular “invalid,” and those who surround him. One reading of Argan focuses on his victimhood, arguing that the character believes so completely in his own illness that…
The Reproductive Sublime in Anthropocenic Literature, Part II: Theorizing a Reproductive Sublime
Livia Arndal Woods Edmund Burke’s 1757 A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful defines the sublime as “whatever is in any sort terrible…[and] productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling” (34). The particular strength of this emotion is the result of the sublime’s…
Exploring the Human Side of Military Medicine Through Anthropomorphised Objects. Part Two.
What is it like to lose a limb and gain a prosthetic? How would you communicate to others this embodied experience and make sense of having to incorporate technology into your bodily identity? In October’s post, I introduced Harry Parker’s recent novel Anatomy of a Soldier, a semi-autobiographical account of limb loss and prosthetic gain….
23andMe as Modern Day Wunderkammer
Whether collected on journeys around the world, bartered for with tradesmen dealing in wonders, or obtained as a gift, the objects within Renaissance Wunderkammern spanned an extremely wide spectrum—from antique busts to horns that could cure any ailment. Paintings and illustrations of these rooms show off large spaces filled to crowdedness with a plethora…
Menopause: The Female Mummy’s Curse
Daisy Butcher The nineteenth century’s fascination with Egypt reached its apogee in the Mummy novel—from Jane Webb Loudon’s 1827 The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century, the first book to feature a reanimated Egyptian mummy, to Bram Stoker’s 1903 The Jewell of Seven Stars, the period abounded with literary representations of the reanimated dead….
Exploring the Human Side of Military Medicine Through Anthropomorphised Objects. Part One.
Figure One. On display in the photograph are examples of modern prosthetic legs. Taken with permission at the National Army Museum, London. Have you ever wondered what it is like to be an object involved in the treatment of an injured soldier? In Harry Parker’s recent novel, Anatomy of a Soldier, he tells the story…
Embodied Prisons
Sneha Mantri Little Dorrit is, above all, a novel about prisons. In addition to the literal Marshalsea prison that is home for the Dorrit family in the first half of the novel, we are taken to the Circumlocution Office, a bureaucratic imprisonment of any sort of innovation, and the Clennam house, which Mrs. Clennam never…
Revaluing Illness: Virginia Woolf’s “On Being Ill”
Travis Chi Wing Lau // Recently republished by Paris Press, Virginia Woolf’s meditation from the sickbed first appeared in T.S. Eliot’s The Criterion in January 1926. In this short reflection, I want to consider how Woolf offers us an early model for a patient-centered narrative medicine that challenges reductive assumptions about sickness as a state…
Lecture recap: “Silencing the Body: Hypnosis, Music, and Pain in the 19th Century”
With Joelle M. Abi-Rached, Céline Frigau Manning, Carmel Raz Sharing from her current book project on music and hypnosis, Professor Céline Frigau Manning (Associate Professor of Performance Studies and Italian at Université Paris 8 – Institut Universitaire de France) takes pain as the arena where the two subjects overlap. Hypnosis, she argues, encompasses at once…
