Rosa Geoghegan // Following their diagnoses with the plagues of their respective societies and milieux, tuberculosis and AIDS, the 19th-century English poet John Keats and the 20th-century French writer Hervé Guibert confronted in their writing their imminent deaths and limited time. There was no mystery as to the outcome of their suffering; Keats, a nurse…
Tag: Illness and Francophone Literature
Colonial Medicine and Literary Geography: Placelessness in Patrick Deville’s “Plague and Cholera”
Eleanor Grabowski // A tropical vista of lush, green trees, endless mountains, and brilliant sunlight. This idyllic landscape graces the original cover of the Points edition of Patrick Deville’s 2012 novel Peste & Choléra, also sheathed in a bold, red banner announcing it as the winner of the Prix Femina. [1] Yet there is something…
Yellow Fever and Other Plagues: Saint-Domingue, Biopolitics, and the Roots of Racism in American Public Health
Sam Millner // “Let’s be realistic: the Atlantic is the Atlantic (with all its port cities) because it was once engendered by the copulation of Europe — that insatiable solar bull — with the Caribbean archipelago; the Atlantic is today the Atlantic (the navel of capitalism) because Europe, in its mercantilist laboratory, conceived the project…
Syphilis, Silence, and Suffering: Re-introducing Syphilis to “La Doulou”
Lillian Rountree // Finding a modern literary depiction of syphilis is nearly impossible. The disease has been academically and culturally dismissed — from Susan Sontag’s claim in Illness as Metaphor that the disease is “not mysterious” and thus limited in its metaphorical and literary power, to Matthew Macfadyen’s character on HBO’s Succession noting that “You…
Essay Series: “Illness and Francophone Literature and History”
Madeleine Dobie & Thomas Dodman // This collection of essays in Synapsis grew out of a course on pandemics in francophone history and culture that we offered in Columbia’s Department of French and Institute for Comparative Literature and Society in fall 2021. The unprecedented experience (at least in our community) of teaching in the midst…