The Cultural Heritage of Psychiatry and its Literary Transformations: Middle Ages to the Present Ed. Katrin Röder & Cornelia Wächter
Call for contributions
This volume explores the history of English, American and Anglophone
literary representations of mental distress and its medical
investigation and treatment as significant parts of the cultural
heritage of psychiatry since the Middle Ages. In line with Aleida
Assmann’s approach, the volume perceives cultural heritage as ‘that part
of the material and immaterial cultural memory that has been selected
and destined for active transfer and circulation’ (2020, 9, transl.
K.R.).The Cultural Heritage of Psychiatry and its Literary Transformations: Middle Ages to the Present (working
title)approaches the cultural heritage of psychiatry as a complicated
gift that connects the past to the present and the future. Like all
forms of cultural heritage and functional memory, the cultural heritage
of psychiatry calls for a responsible use of its components, for their
preservation and protection against damage and suppression as well as
for perpetual transformation, renewal and change (Assmann: 2013, 330;
Assmann 2020, 9).
The cultural heritage of psychiatry is often regarded as problematic,
difficult and burdensome, not least because of the long history of
medicalization, institutionalized confinement, constraint and abuse of
‘patients’/users (Foucault 1988; Showalter 1985; Reaume 2010; Lewis
2010; Punzi 2019, 243-244, 248-249; Punzi/Röder 2019, 197-201). While
all cultural heritage is selective and incomplete (Assmann 2008, 106),
the fragmentariness of the heritage of psychiatry is to a considerable
degree the result of processes of social, political and rhetorical
exclusion, that is, of the silencing, suppression, stigmatization, moral
condemnation and invalidation of ‘patients”/’users’
voices/self-presentations in different periods of cultural and
intellectual history (Foucault 1988, passim; Showalter 1985, passim;
Punzi 2019; Guest Pryal 2010, 479-480).
In this context, literature is assigned a preeminent role as ‘the
mnemonic art par excellence’ (Lachmann 2008, 301). As a reintegrative
interdiscourse, it simultaneously creates and observes memory,
representing a ‘body of commemorative actions that include the knowledge
stored by a culture, and virtually all texts a culture has produced and
by which a culture is constituted’ (ibid.; Erll 2008, 391).
Hence, practices of writing, reading and creative appropriation
revolving around the topics of mental distress/madness and forms of
treatment performatively construct the cultural memory and cultural
heritage of psychiatry. They interact with extant cultural texts in
diverse ways, e.g. through convergence, divergence, interrogation,
assimilation or repulsion (Lachmann 2008, 301; Neumann 2008, 334,
337-338; Paris 2017). In these interactions, intertextuality plays a
central role because it ‘demonstrates the process by which a culture […]
continually rewrites and retranscribes itself […]’ (Lachmann 2008,
301).
The planned volume will explore how literary texts shape the cultural
memory and heritage of psychiatry, how they interact with dominant and
alternative forms and traditions of treatment and care and how they bear
witness to and fragmentarily retrieve/imagine suppressed, medicalized
voices, thereby producing counter-cultural memories (Saunders 2008,
327). By investigating the interdependence and complex interaction
between literary and non-literary texts in their historical and cultural
contexts, the anthology will emphasize the close connection between
history and cultural heritage that was often either neglected or
questioned in the past (Assmann 2020, 10).
By integrating the perspective of critical heritage studies, this
volume will interrogate collective forms of cultural identity and
literary canon formation with regard to what is forgotten, rejected and
excluded (Assmann 2020, 10). It perceives the cultural heritage of
psychiatry as a dynamic, globalized, dissonant processthat is relative
to as well as formative of changing and fragmentary systems of value and
significance (Wells 2017).
Although there is a comprehensive body of recent and prevailing
book-length studies about the relationship between English, American and
Anglophone literature, psychiatric discourse and conceptions of
madness/mental distress in specific periods, genres and historical and
cultural contexts (e. g. Rogers 2019; Crawford 2019; Gaedtke 2017;
Whitehead 2017; Stanback 2016; Iseli 2015; Dickson/Ingram 2012;
Ingram/Sim/Lawlor et al. 2011; Sedlmayr 2011; Veit-Wild 2006; Neely
2004; Lange 1997; Ziolkowski 1990), investigations of the practices of
remembering the cultural heritage of psychiatry in relation to
historical changes in the representation of mental distress and its
treatment remain a desideratum. This volume seeks to provide central
insights into these topics.
We invite chapters (each with a length of ca. 7000 words) exploring the following questions:
- How do literary texts from different periods of literary history
interact with the history and cultural heritage of psychiatry and with
the cultural representations of mental distress in their specific
historical moments (e.g. through intertextuality, imaginative
appropriation …)?
- How do they bear witness to, negotiate, criticize, challenge,
imaginatively re-configurate, transform and re-invent this heritage?
- How do literary texts problematize the relationship between memory, heritage, forgetting, fragmentation and suppression?
- How do they represent the heritage of psychiatry and the cultural
imaginary of mental distress in ways that make this heritage relevant
for their historical present and their envisaged future?
Each chapter should start with a concise overview of concepts and
discourses of mental distress/madness and the heritage of psychiatry in
the respective periods of literary/cultural history. Thereafter, they
should provide an analysis of selected literary texts (one or more, any
genre) with regard to their techniques of representing and remembering
conceptions of mental distress/madness and psychiatric treatment in
their respective historical present and in reciprocal intertextual
connections with their respective historical past (and perhaps their
respective envisaged future). Whenever possible, discussions of
intersectional relationships between concepts of mental
distress/madness, psychiatric treatment and gender, sexual orientation,
ethnicity, race and migrant identities should be included.
Please send your abstract (500-600 words) until 1 September 2020 to kroeder@uni-potsdam.deor cornelia.waechter@rub.de
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Surveys
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A Cultural History of Disability in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Joyce Huff and Martha Stoddard Holmes (London, Oxford: Bloomsbury, 2020).
A Cultural History of Disability in the Modern Age, edited by David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder (London & Oxford: Bloomsbury, 2020).
A Mad People’s History of Madness, edited by Dale Peterson (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982).
Madness: A Brief History, edited by Roy Porter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
