Cynthia Harris To many readers, Frankenstein is best read as a “birth myth,” even as a “cautionary obstetric tale” that warns of the horrors of motherhood.[1] These interpretations have historically relied on seeing Victor Frankenstein as analogous to the pregnant and later post-partum mother, possibly even to Mary Shelley herself. In my Fall semester…
Tag: Literature
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…
Tales of the City as Primary Source: AIDS, Fiction, and History
John Carranza Contemporary understanding and empathizing with minority groups, such as the gay and lesbian community, requires historically grounded knowledge. For example, the AIDS epidemic became a defining moment in gay and lesbian history. The disease due to its complex and lethal nature, bewildered and stumped scientists, causing death to loom large over the gay…
Special Event: “Fire, Water, Moon: Supplemental Seasons in a Time without Season”
For a special lecture bridging medical, environmental, and literary humanities within our Explorations in the Medical Humanities series, Professor Anne-Lise François (Associate Professor, Departments of English and Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley) posed the question of how our thinking about human temporality can change when we avail ourselves to alternative modalities of seasonality and…