Call for Papers for a Special Issue of Gothic Studies: the Gothic and Medical Humanities
Call for Papers for a Special Issue of Gothic Studies:
the Gothic and Medical Humanities
Proposals are invited for a special issue of Gothic
Studies exploring intersections between the Gothic and medical humanities.
Gothic studies has long grappled with suffering bodies,
and the fragility of human flesh in the grip of medical and legal discourse
continues to be manifest in chilling literature and film. The direction of
influence goes both ways: Gothic literary elements have arguably influenced
medical writing, such as the nineteenth-century clinical case study. In this
second decade of the twenty-first century, it seems apt to freshly examine
intersections between the two fields.
The closing years of the twentieth century saw the
emergence of medical humanities, an interdisciplinary blend of humanities and
social science approaches under the dual goals of using arts to enhance medical
education and interrogating medical practice and discourse. Analysis of period
medical discourse, legal categories and medical technologies can enrich
literary criticism in richly contextualising fictional works within medical
practices. Such criticism can be seen as extending the drive towards
historicised and localised criticism that has characterised much in Gothic
studies in recent decades.
Our field offers textual strategies for analysing the
processes by which medical discourse, medical processes and globalised
biotechnological networks can, at times, do violence to human bodies and minds
– both of patient and practitioner. Cultural studies of medicine analyse and
unmask this violence. This special issue will explore Gothic representations of
the way medical practice controls, classifies and torments the body in the
service of healing.
Essays could address any of the following in any period,
eighteenth-century to the present:
Medical discourse as itself Gothic (e.g., metaphors in
medical writing; links between case histories and the Gothic tradition), and/or
reflections on how specific medical discourses have shaped Gothic literary
forms
Illness narratives and the Gothic (e.g., using Arthur
Frank’s ‘chaos narratives’ of helplessness in The Wounded Storyteller).
Literary texts about medical processes as torture/torment
in specific historical and geographic contexts (including contemporary
contexts)
Doctors or nurses represented in literature as themselves
Gothic ‘victims’, constrained by their medical
environment
Genetic testing; organ harvest; genetic engineering;
reproductive technologies; limb prostheses; human cloning, and more.
To date the links between Gothic and psychiatric medical
discourse have been the most thoroughly explored, so preference will be given
to articles exploring other, non-psychiatric medical contexts in the interests
of opening up new connections.
Please email 500-word abstract and curriculum vitae to Dr
Sara Wasson,s.wasson@napier.ac.uk. Deadline for proposals: 1 October 2013.