Melancholy Minds and Painful Bodies: Genealogy, Geography, Pathogeny
University of
Liverpool, 9-11 July 2013
Strange Contraries in
thee combine,
Both hell and Heaven in thee meet,
Thou greatest bitter,
greatest sweet
No pain is like thy pain, no pleasure too like thine.
John
Norris, 1687
One of the major developments in the study of melancholia
over the last thirty years has been the rise to
aesthetic and cultural
prominence of varieties of negative emotions
proposed and discussed as melancholy, including different conceptions, analyses,
and portrayals from grief to insanity. Most recently, Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia (2011) happens to be the melodramatic
adaptation of the concept fuelled by cinematic symbols. Correspondingly, often observed as ‘a central
European discourse’, melancholia has resurfaced to embody complementary or
paradoxical notions not merely in the literary analysis of texts and contexts,
but it has also emerged to retrieve its historical categorization. The
cultural and social history of emotions entwined with modern medical and psychiatric
lexicalization has opened new pathways
to provide relative definitions of
melancholia. However, theories about the choice of analogies for melancholy,
whether aesthetic, cinematic, religious, or medical, somehow fail to
distinguish the connections between
contrary factors involved in melancholia.
It is also noteworthy that theories of characterization, no
matter of what kind, tend to reformulate and evaluate contrary factors for the
sake of preserving ‘superiority’ according to prevalent taste at each moment in
time. In Britain, for example, individual and collective melancholia has been
appreciated as a sign of genius and national pride at one time and announced as a national malady at
another. Analogous is the contemporary history of behavioural rather than
cognitive attributes to grief,
e.g. tearfulness. Pain, in comparison, is bodily and often mental distress
which in the past was closely perceived in relation to melancholia, but today research
on pain is divorced from depression let alone melancholy. Thus, we miss the ‘melancholy-pain bridge’ in
contemporary scholarship of mental and physical suffering. On the other hand,
while pain is seen through the lens of universality, with management models
stretching from Chinese medicine to Latin America, melancholia has rarely been
investigated beyond the Western borders with regard to its genealogy,
pathology, pathogeny, and management.
Whether this geographical focus is a matter of re-establishing pre-eminence or in want of psycholinguistic reference,
thereby centred on a gap in universal scientific communication, it invites intriguing
and challenging enquiries.
We welcome
contributions from different fields in
humanities, social and life sciences in the following categories and other
relevant areas:
- Diversity in the geography of melancholia and pain
- The relationship between Western theories of emotions and
Oriental conceptions
- The European hypothesis of melancholia-pain in non-European
cultures
- Orientalism, grief, and abstinence
- Emotionality as negativity
- Gender attributes and tearfulness
- Art history, muscle tension, and the painful posture
- Interpretation, assumption, semantic relation
- Fear, Pain, and melancholy dominance
- Depression and pain
- Paranoia, melancholia, and pain
- Misconceptions; cyclothymia and bipolar disorder
- Melancholy appropriation, ethnicity, multicultural
perspectives
- Cosmology and elegiac pain management
- Cinematic symbols
- Literary emotionality, fictive superiority
- Embodied cognition
- Anaesthetics, the relationship between medical management
and other models
- Lyric manifestation of melancholy and pain
Submission:
Abstracts and panel proposals of up to 300 words per
20-minute papers are welcome plus a short biographical note. If you wish to
attend without presenting a paper, please email the organisers with your CV and
a statement as to how your research relates to the conference. Postgraduate
students can apply for Dr Wasfia Mhabak Memorial
Grant by sending your abstract, 1000-word research statement, and CV to the
conference board.
A selection of papers expanded and edited after the
conference will be considered for publication in the International Journal of Literature and Psychology (issues 2014). Further
particulars: http://paranoiapain.liv.ac.uk
Submission Deadline:
1 March 2013
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