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Proposals are invited for a
special issue of Gothic Studies exploring intersections between the Gothic and
medical humanities.
Gothic studies has long
grappled with suffering bodies, and the fragility of human flesh in the grip of
medical and legal discourse continues to be manifest in chilling literature and
film. The direction of influence goes both ways: Gothic literary elements have
arguably influenced medical writing, such as the nineteenth-century clinical
case study. In this second decade of the twenty-first century, it seems apt to
freshly examine intersections between the two fields.
The closing years of the
twentieth century saw the emergence of medical humanities, an interdisciplinary
blend of humanities and social science approaches under the dual goals of using
arts to enhance medical education and interrogating medical practice and
discourse. Analysis of period medical discourse, legal categories and medical
technologies can enrich literary criticism in richly contextualising fictional
works within medical practices. Such criticism can be seen as extending the
drive towards historicised and localised criticism that has characterised much
in Gothic studies in recent decades.
Our field offers textual
strategies for analysing the processes by which medical discourse, medical
processes and globalised biotechnological networks can, at times, do violence
to human bodies and minds – both of patient and practitioner. Cultural studies
of medicine analyse and unmask this violence. This special issue will explore
Gothic representations of the way medical practice controls, classifies and torments
the body in the service of healing.
Essays could address any of the
following in any period, eighteenth-century to the present:
- Medical discourse as itself Gothic (e.g., metaphors in medical writing; links between case histories and the Gothic tradition), and/or reflections on how specific medical discourses have shaped Gothic literary forms
- Illness narratives and the Gothic (e.g., using Arthur Frank’s ‘chaos narratives’ of helplessness in The Wounded Storyteller ).
- Literary texts about medical processes as torture/torment in specific historical and geographic contexts (including contemporary contexts)
- Doctors or nurses represented in literature as themselves Gothic ‘victims’, constrained by their medical environment
- Genetic testing; organ harvest; genetic engineering; reproductive technologies; limb prostheses; human cloning, and more.
To date the links between
Gothic and psychiatric medical discourse have been the most thoroughly
explored, so preference will be given to articles exploring other,
non-psychiatric medical contexts in the interests of opening up new
connections.
Please email 500-word abstract
and curriculum vitae to Dr Sara Wasson, s.wasson@napier.ac.uk
. Deadline for proposals: 1 October 2013.
The official journal of the
International Gothic Studies Association considers the field of Gothic studies
from the eighteenth century to the present day. The aim of Gothic Studies is
not merely to open a forum for dialogue and cultural criticism, but to provide
a specialist journal for scholars working in a field which is today taught or researched in almost all academic
establishments. Gothic Studies invites contributions from scholars working
within any period of the Gothic; interdisciplinary scholarship is especially
welcome, as are readings in the media and beyond the written word.
For more information on Gothic
Studies , including submission guidelines and subscription recommendations,
please see the journals website: http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?showinfo=ip022
