Tuesday 8th May
5.15-6.30pm, All Soul's College, Hovenden Room
5.15-6.30pm, All Soul's College, Hovenden Room
Sam Gormley (Merton) - 'Antoine Volodine, Dead or Alive'
In this rough paper, I sketch out briefly some of the ways in which we might think through the question of “life” in Antoine Volodine’s Terminus radieux (2014). The explicitly magical elements of this novel are present chiefly in the form of mutated life-forms, transformed through centuries of exposure to nuclear radiation. Possessing uncanny abilities over life itself, the novel’s antagonist positions himself as a sovereign force with the power to both kill and reanimate others at will. The ensuing flattening of the difference between life and death, common throughout Volodine’s “post-exotic” universe, nonetheless opens up a space of potential dissidence against this domination, in which the creativity of fiction itself plays a significant role.
Sarah Jones (Oriel) - 'Narratives of the Therapeutic Encounter in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century France'
This paper brings together the medical humanities, the socio-cultural history of late eighteenth and early nineteenth medicine, and nineteenth-century French literary studies to examine the importance of narrativity in both the philosophy of medical science and in the novel. Beginning with the narrative turn in twentieth- and twenty-first century in the medical humanities, I outline the newfound emphasis placed on the patient’s illness narrative. I then argue that a similar narrativity is present in the quasi-science of mesmerism, the eighteenth-century antecedent of hypnotism and psychoanalysis. Analysing the historical documents of Franz Anton Mesmer, his followers, and detractors, I suggest the eroticization of the medical rapport between practitioner and subject as central to the medical phenomenon of animal magnetism. I then turn to the role played by mesmerism in the novels of Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), with a particular focus on the Vautrin trilogy (Le Père Goriot (1830), Illusions perdues (1837-43), and Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (1838-47). Despite the direct influence of mesmerist ideas on Balzac’s work, I point towards how Balzac’s novels represent a significant departure from the heterosexual matrix commonplace to contemporary criticisms of Mesmerism. In contrast to critical scholarship that usually places the nineteenth-century novel alongside the modernization and scientization of medicine from the Enlightenment onwards, I thus argue that both modes are in fact deeply invested in how narrative points towards, but fails to elucidate, the unknowable and unsayable aspects of life, gender, sex, and power.
Sarah Jones (Oriel) - 'Narratives of the Therapeutic Encounter in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century France'
This paper brings together the medical humanities, the socio-cultural history of late eighteenth and early nineteenth medicine, and nineteenth-century French literary studies to examine the importance of narrativity in both the philosophy of medical science and in the novel. Beginning with the narrative turn in twentieth- and twenty-first century in the medical humanities, I outline the newfound emphasis placed on the patient’s illness narrative. I then argue that a similar narrativity is present in the quasi-science of mesmerism, the eighteenth-century antecedent of hypnotism and psychoanalysis. Analysing the historical documents of Franz Anton Mesmer, his followers, and detractors, I suggest the eroticization of the medical rapport between practitioner and subject as central to the medical phenomenon of animal magnetism. I then turn to the role played by mesmerism in the novels of Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), with a particular focus on the Vautrin trilogy (Le Père Goriot (1830), Illusions perdues (1837-43), and Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (1838-47). Despite the direct influence of mesmerist ideas on Balzac’s work, I point towards how Balzac’s novels represent a significant departure from the heterosexual matrix commonplace to contemporary criticisms of Mesmerism. In contrast to critical scholarship that usually places the nineteenth-century novel alongside the modernization and scientization of medicine from the Enlightenment onwards, I thus argue that both modes are in fact deeply invested in how narrative points towards, but fails to elucidate, the unknowable and unsayable aspects of life, gender, sex, and power.
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