Art et maladie

Art, Disease, and Expression

Call for Papers

FORUM Postgraduate Journal Issue 31 (2020):

Science and art are the very nature of human attempts to understand and describe the world around us. As COVID-19 continues to dominate public discourse across the world - its ongoing effects trickling into every facet of our lives - the relationship between our health and how it affects the way we move through society has never felt more prescient. The 31st issue of FORUM aims to explore what has been identified as ‘sickness’ in literature and art through the years. How have the body and mind been treated by writers, artists, and cultural commentators - in sickness and in health.

Artists and authors have long recognised the metaphorical potential for sickness and disease to comment upon social and political issues. Charles Dickens, for example, shows how disease transcends social hierarchies in his novel Bleak House. Another example is Charlotte Perkins-Gilman, who in her short-story, The Yellow Wallpaper illustrates perfectly the attitude towards the mental and physical health of women in the late nineteenth century. More recently, Ken Currie’s haunting portrait Three Oncologists (2002) expresses the sense of horror and anxiety cancer continues to evoke. The relationship between art and sickness is not unilateral. Frieda Kahlo’s self-portraits often deal with her ailing body and she transmutes her body on canvas, with vivid description of her medical history. Similarly, medical illustration and phrenological heads were used to help physicians puzzle out the mysteries of the human mind and body, while Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical drawings are considered some of the most significant achievements of Renaissance science. Art therapy - a form of psychotherapy - uses art media as its main mode of expression and communication. There are multiple examples of sickness, disease, disability, (mis)diagnosis that pervades art - the body, especially those which are marked as ‘deviant’, ‘non-conforming’, ‘foreign’ and the psyche, which has been prodded and probed to solve universal questions of identity, human rationale and behaviour, has been continuously explored by authors, poets, artists and philosophers alike.

For issue 31 of FORUM we seek submissions from a range of disciplines which engage with concepts of sickness and health. We encourage interdisciplinary papers that converge scientific and artistic discourses, and look forward to papers that look at our current circumstance as well as literature as a child of multidisciplinary discourse. Submissions may relate, but are not limited to:

● Material culture, the language of disease

● Mind and body

● Isolation and exposure

● The ethics of treatment: transgression as sickness, oppression as cure

● Holism, homeopathy, self-care, physical, spiritual, and mental health

● Quackery

● Contagion, contamination, and quarantine

● Art therapy

● The tortured artist

Papers must be between 3,000 – 5,000 words in length, formatted according to MLA guidelines. FORUM is also considering academic book reviews (1,000 words) and multimedia and alternative presentations for publication. Please email your article, a short abstract and your academic CV in separate, clearly labelled DOC(X). files to editors@forumjournal.org by 30th November, 2020. All eligible articles will be peer reviewed prior to publication. Only one submission per author per issue is permitted.

Contact Info:

Amy Waterson & Adrija Ghosh, Editors
Forum: Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts
The University of Edinburgh

www.forumjournal.org


Contact Email:
editors@forumjournal.org

URL:
http://www.forumjournal.org