Showing papers in "Literature and Medicine in 2013"

Powers of zero: aggregation, negation, and the dimensions of scale in Indra Sinha's Animal's People.

Abstract: Set in a fictionalized version of Bhopal, India, Indra Sinha's Animal's People is a vivid dramatization of disempowerment and environmental injustice, juxtaposed with the power of narrative and the resilience of communal spirit. Perhaps most intriguingly, it presents hopelessness as a source of strength, the enigmatic "power of zero" possessed by those who having nothing. This article uses Sinha's remarkable novel to think about the novel form as a model for applied social change. The challenge lies in the dynamics of scale. The locus of individual action and identity politics usually associated with the novel form is inadequate to address the issues of aggregation, collectivity, and networked interconnection that are the stuff of global crisis in human and ecological health, especially the elusive the imperative to "go to scale." By contrast, this essay argues that the novel be treated as a thought experiment in the quantum physics of social change.

The Nineteenth-Century Quarantine Narrative

Abstract: This essay articulates the literary and political consequences of a sub-genre of nineteenth-century travel writing that I call the quarantine narrative. Twelve texts, once fashionable but now little-known and understudied, published between 1832 and 1847 are examined herein. Written primarily by itinerant Americans—including titans of the antebellum periodical scene, Knickerbocker authors Nathaniel P. Willis, Theodore S. Fay, and Henry T. Tuckerman—these works collectively disseminate an anticontagionist perspective that derides the practice of quarantining “dangerous elements” to protect the well-being of a population. Linked together by an expose prose style aimed at demystifying and debunking medical detainment, and by the use of irony intended to prompt new thinking about national identity formation, these narratives convey a surprisingly positive attitude toward foreign influence during an early period of global travel, commerce, and cultural circulation.

Satire as Medicine in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century: The History of a Metaphor

Abstract: This essay explores the changing cultural meanings of the comparison between satire and medicine in literature of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century (1660–1800). Drawing on examples from a wide range of texts, I argue that medical rhetoric not only remained important in the theorization and classification of satire as a genre, but also played a prominent role within satiric literature, as writers began to complicate and challenge the conventional critical associations between satirists and physicians. Ultimately, I suggest that the satire-as-medicine metaphor came to stand in for a number of important cultural debates, including those between the arts and sciences, between “high” and “low” art, and between the ancients and moderns.

Searching for medicine in Walker Percy's the Moviegoer.

Abstract: Walker Percy was trained as a physician, and most of his novels are clearly invested with his concern for the medical profession. At first glance, The Moviegoer (1961) looks like the exception. It is the story of Binx Bolling, who has recently embarked on a “search,” though he cannot name its goal. Yet, the text offers numerous clues that Binx is searching for a life in medical practice. First, he exercises a sophisticated medical vocabulary and habitually assesses others’ health. Furthermore, by becoming a doctor, Binx might achieve the kind of “certification” for which he longs, defeat “the malaise,” reassert his limited respect for science, and better understand his deceased father, who was a surgeon. Finally, in Binx’s relationship with Kate, the text also offers a new model for the physician-patient relationship—one of mutual, existential commitment—thereby mapping one of the heights to which the medical profession might aspire

The Bacteriological Modernism of Joris-Karl Huysmans's Against Nature

Abstract: The French author Joris-Karl Huysmans’ novel Against Nature (1884) is notorious for its depiction of anti-social, extravagant life-style, as well as for its highly descriptive style, saturated by details and criss-crossed by a multitude of cultural references. This reading of Huysmans’ novel argues that the depiction of the main character’s attempt to gain existential self-control, by isolating himself from society, forms a phenomenological expression of the way in which the breakthrough of the germ theory of disease contributed to a general feeling of a subjective lack of control in the second half of the nineteenth century. As a manifestation of a wariness of aesthetic influence, the novel’s style mirrors the main character’s relation to society. The style forms a rupture of the aesthetics of naturalism in the novel, by means of which it contributes to the formation of another aesthetic norm—that of modernism.

Insecure lives: zombies, global health, and the totalitarianism of generalization.

Abstract: This article examines how biological and political insecurity have become increasingly imbricated with one another. Building on Priscilla Wald's assertion that contagion reveals the connections of an imagined community, I show how it also reveals disconnections: who is dispossessed by these imagined communities. Through examinations of the Resident Evil franchise, Steven Soderbergh's Contagion, and Max Brooks's World War Z, I demonstrate how through contagion, individuals are marked as biologically and politically threatening, dispossessed of an imagined community, and then subjected to violence. In all of these texts, the globalization of an imbricated health and security complex enacts a generalizing logic that obscures local history and cultural specificity. This logic works to dispossess individuals of imagined communities along racialized, gendered, and classed lines, and makes that dispossession appear apolitical. This article advocates instead for a recognition of the history and relation of the terms and figures that populate the cultural imaginary.

Reading and AIDS Literacy in Allen Barnett's Short Fiction

Abstract: This essay traces a tradition of texts that document the impact of AIDS literacy on gay men’s understanding of the epidemic. AIDS literacy refers to practices of reading and information exchange that engage with different bodies of knowledge from cultural debates to biomedical discourse, and with various genres of representation from media portrayals to obituaries. Focusing on the stories of Allen Barnett and the recent public discussions surrounding the death of former New York City mayor Ed Koch, this essay argues that the cultivation of AIDS literacy is paramount for confronting the unfinished history of AIDS. By staging AIDS literacy in two of his stories—“Philostorgy, Now Obscure” and “The Times As It Knows Us,” both published in 1990—Barnett bestows to his audience a meaningful set of ideas about gay identity, reading practices, and rituals of remembrance that can revitalize AIDS consciousness at the present historical moment.

Confined to bed: illness, narrative, and female authority in Charlotte Temple.

Abstract: Susanna Rowson’s early American bestseller, Charlotte Temple , has typically been read as a story of seduction and abandonment. Not only is the title character abandoned but also the revolutionary ideals of female equality that were ultimately rejected in the formation of the new republic. This essay, however, focuses primarily on the power that other female characters wield through narrative mastery. It locates female narrative power within the social space of the bed—a place where sex, reproduction, reading, writing, and illness converge. Charlotte Temple redefines female authority and authorship by figuring the domestic space of the bed as narrative space—a theater for action—juxtaposed with the street, where the threat of female narrative power is represented as contagion. This essay reads Charlotte Temple as a proto-feminist education in narrative strategies that both resists and reinforces perceptions of female narrative as contagious.

Global Health and World Literature: Translating Silences in Cambodian Writing on Sex Slavery

Abstract: Increasing attention to cosmopolitanism, globalization, and transnationalism in the last two decades has led to burgeoning interest in the phenomenon of world literature. But despite the field's emphasis on literature that maintains a crucial relation to the world, scholarship on world literature has not yet examined the relationship between this corpus and many urgent matters of global significance. This article attempts to address some of these lacunae by analyzing the manipulation of silences surrounding sex slavery in different versions of the Cambodian human rights advocate Somaly Mam's Le silence de l'innocence (Silence of Innocence, 2005), including this French-language memoir's Asian-language translations. Silence of Innocence brings to the fore certain aspects of sex trafficking that remain relatively neglected in statistical and sociological accounts. Most noteworthy among these is manipulation of the voices of the abused.

Tubercular capital: American Yiddish literature at the sanatorium.

Abstract: This article investigates the scene of writing and fundraising that was supported by the Jewish Consumptives' Relief Society (JCRS), a sanatorium founded in Denver, Colorado for indigent Jews suffering from tuberculosis This case study investigates the coarticulation of a medical institution and the history of Yiddish literary production and translation in America, with a specific interest in the career and medical history of the Yiddish poet known as Yehoash Drawing on the methodological interventions of Bruno Latour and Pierre Bourdieu, I argue that there emerges a traceable, literary-philanthropic network that runs to and through the JCRS, imbricating institution and writer in an exchange of what I call "tubercular capital"

A plague on both your houses of worship: the meanings of epidemic disease in William Byrd II and Cotton Mather.

Abstract: Treatises on epidemic disease by two North American British Colonial literary figures, William Byrd II and Cotton Mather, demonstrate similar preoccupations with epidemics’ religious meanings, despite Byrd’s Anglican and Mather’s Calvinist Congregationalist differing theological commitments. Both men situate epidemic disease in the inherent weakness of the human condition, while Byrd is more inclined toward human reason and Mather toward spiritual intervention in the selection of preventives and treatments. Mather’s role in the 1721 smallpox inoculation controversy may represent competition between Boston’s traditional ministerial intelligentsia and the emerging university-trained medical intelligentsia.

Literary Disorders and Translation Treatment: Curing Chekhov's "The Black Monk"

Abstract: Since the 1980s, one strand of translation theory has likened translators to psychoanalysts who treat incoherent narratives. This article uses Constance Garnett's 1917 translation of Chekhov's "The Black Monk" to study how translators seek to "cure" original texts. In this case, since Chekhov's protagonist is ill, the translator's treatment occurs at various levels of the narrative. The article is built around the longstanding conflict between foreignizing and domesticating translation theories, staged directly in the translator's struggle with the fictional character. The two practices are equated, over the course of the paper, with two medical modes: infection and inoculation. Chekhov's original text embraces the former, casting untranslatability as a necessary textual disease; his translator promotes the latter, disinfecting the original through her translation. Garnett's translation strategy discloses an anxiety provoked by Chekhov's story, and also reveals more generally how illness may be necessary to the transmission of texts.

Diagnosis and Revelation in Vsevolod Garshin's "The Red Flower" and Anton Chekhov's "An Attack of Nerves"

Abstract: This article examines Vsevolod Garshin's 1883 story "The Red Flower" and Chekhov's 1888 story "An Attack of Nerves" in light of contemporaneous work on diagnostic classificatory systems by the German neurologist Paul Julius Mobius and psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin. By situating these Russian stories within a German psychodiagnostic context, rather than seeing them in the tradition of the French experimental novel, it becomes possible to understand these stories not as single instances of illness revealing truth, but as narratives that simultaneously take on diagnosis in its social, medical and legal instantiations. Reading Chekhov's and Garshin's stories in this way opens up a new interpretive possibility: that diagnosis and self-diagnosis could form a model for a creative restructuring concerned less with "proof" than with multiple overlapping narratives of identification. Chekhov's and Garshin's tales illuminate how and when the question of what illness "reveals" can be subordinated to what reveals illness.