Le corps pathologique

The Pathological Body: European Literary and Cultural Perspectives in the Age of Modern Medicine 

 
Open Library of Humanities, 2024



I am delighted to announce the publication of this open access special issue which highlights the symbiosis of the Modern Languages with Medical Humanities through the ‘pathological body’ in literature. Drawing on Italian, German, Spanish, and French literary texts from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, the articles focus on anxieties around the human body and the sick body’s relationship with language(s) and translation. In their interconnection with the medical sphere, the Introduction notes the critical role that European literature(s) played in creating a medical-humanistic hierarchy in the nineteenth century, including producing the concept of ‘normality’. The special issue calls for the collaboration of researchers across languages—uniquely skilled in the linguistic, socio-cultural, and historical dimensions of their discipline—to help redress entrenched gendered, racialised, and ableist injustices that spread globally from the establishing of nineteenth-century European medicine, thus identifying Modern Languages as a practical and ethical toolbox in raising consciousness about the modern making of the human being.



Kit Yee Wong
Introduction: The Symbiosis of Language(s), Literature, and the Medical Humanities



Françoise Campbell
Doubling, Decay and Discontinuity: Pathology and The (Post)human Body in Marie Darrieussecq’s Notre vie dans les forêts



Kit Yee Wong
Illness, Aesthetics, and Body Politics: Forging the Third Republic in Émile Zola's La Faute de l'abbé Mouret



Marta Arnaldi
Contagious Otherness: Translating Communicable Diseases in the Modern Italian and Francophone Novel



Katharine Anne Murphy
The Contagious Effects of Rural Violence: Social Pathologies and Injured Bodies in Blasco Ibáñez’s La barraca (The Cabin)



James Illingworth
The Cataleptic Novel: Living on with George Sand



Robert Craig
Learning from Psychiatry? Gottfried Benn, Alfred Döblin, and the Limits of ‘Narrative Medicine’