Call for Chapters for Edited Book
Edited by Benjamin Dalton (Lancaster University) and Áine Larkin (Maynooth University)
The hospital has occupied a dynamic and generative position in French and Francophone cultural production. Whilst biomedical science has enjoyed an intimate, symbiotic relationship with French philosophy – from René Descartes’ interest in neurological approaches to the brain in the 17th century, to Georges Canguilhem’s analysis of the biomedical production of the “normal” in the 20th century, to Catherine Malabou’s philosophical engagements with neuroplasticity, brain trauma, and epigenetics today – the hospital occupies a similarly integral, if underexplored, position in French and Francophone cultural production. More recently, engagements with the hospital across thought, film and literature range from philosopher Michel Foucault’s influential critique of clinical space and biopolitical control in Birth of the Clinic (1963); to the Moroccan writer Ahmed Bouanani’s oneiric imagining of clinical landscapes in The Hospital (1989) and Franco-Ivarian writer Véronique Tadjo’s engagement with clinical spaces of the West African Ebola crisis from both human and non-human perspectives in En Compagnie des hommes; to engagements with hospital environments in documentary, from Nicolas Philibert’s look at the Clinique de la Borde psychiatric facility in Every Little Thing (1996) to Claire Simon’s Notre corps(2023)’s surveying of diverse patient narratives in a gynaecology department in Tenon hospital in Paris. French and Francophone documentary cinema has a longstanding interest in clinical spaces and the communities who inhabit and work within them, in films such as Raymond Depardon’s San Clemente (1980), Urgences (1987), and 12 jours (2017); Malek Bensmaïl’s Aliénations (2004); as well as La Moindre des choses (1996), Nicolas Philibert’sDe chaque instant (2019) and his very recent triptych Sur l’Adamant, Averroès et Rosa Parks (2024) and La Machine à écrire et autres sources de tracas (2024) examine clinical spaces and their communities. Maylis de Kerangal’s magisterial Réparer les vivants (2014) breaks new ground in its representation of the hospital; other literary works by Martin Winckler, Antoine Sénanque and Sophie TalMen, and graphic narratives such as Mahieux and Levitre’s Tombés dans l’oreille d’un sourd (2017) offer a wide variety of perspectives on medical professionals’ and patients’ lived experiences of care in hospitals. Across these diverse texts and contexts, the hospital figures at once as a site of both care and of violence; as a source of discovery and inspiration for thought, literature, film, and visual art; and as a physical architecture within which biomedical science and art come together.
This edited collection explores the relationship between the hospital and contemporary French and Francophone thought, literature, film and visual art today, asking: How is the hospital represented in contemporary French and Francophone culture? How do contemporary engagements with the hospital differ from prior literary, filmic and philosophical inhabitations of clinical space? What dialogues exist between these philosophical and artistic engagements and architectural theories and hospital transformation projects? And further: how might philosophical and artistic engagements with the hospital dialogue productively and collaborate with such theories in a mutually transformative relationship? How can filmic, literary and philosophical texts help us to imagine, design, and construct the hospitals of the future?
Possible sections and themes might include, but need not be limited to:
The hospital in French and Francophone philosophy post-Foucault (Malabou, Nancy, Preciado, Stengers, Stiegler, Mbembe) Representations of the hospital and healthcare environments in sub-Saharan Francophone African contexts The hospital and the clinic in DOMTOM and Outremer contexts The hospital in French and Francophone horror and body-horror cinema The hospital and clinical environments in illness narratives The role of the hospital in narratives of sexuality, romance and pleasure in hospital The hospital in queer writing and film The hospital and French/Francophone HIV/AIDS writing and cinema Legacies of post-May 68 innovation Comparative studies Interdisciplinary studies of hospital design and building, for instance across architecture and the Critical Medical Humanities
Please send an abstract of 250-300 words to both Dr Benjamin Dalton (b.dalton@lancaster.ac.uk) and Dr Áine Larkin (aine.larkin@mu.ie) by 31 January 2025.
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