7
Pathologies: Questions of Embodiment in Literature, Arts, and Sciences
20-21 August, 2007: University of Glamorgan
Conference Pack
Contents Page Number
1. Conference theme 2
2. Overall schedule 3
3. Campus Map 5
4. Detailed schedule of papers and panels 6
5. Abstracts of individual papers 9
6. Local information 35
7. Cardiff information 37
8. Cardiff Map 39
9. Travel information 40
10. Pages to write conference notes 41
In the conference folder, you will also find the following leaflets:
· A visitors’ guide to the University of Glamorgan (including a campus map)
· Information regarding the Research Centre for Literature, Arts and Science
· Information regarding the forthcoming Journal of Literature and Science
· Publishers’ promotional material
Conference Theme:
Pathologies
Questions of Embodiment in Literature, Arts, and Sciences
To consider how the body has been pathologised is to ask questions of what it means to be human. As the originating site of humanity the body (extending from the individual to society and nation) is the physical, metaphorical and philosophical place for the inscription of selfhood, identity, normality and change. The multiple pathologies of the body invite us to reflect upon bodily conditions and behaviours that mark out the boundaries of the individual, the social and the national as well as their transgressions. Where does the self begin and end? How do we construct normality, deformity, and monstrosity? How do culture, society and the individual relate and connect across the many pathologies that invade, infect, distress and reconstruct the human?
The Research Centre for Literature, Arts, and Science (RCLAS) at the University of Glamorgan has chosen to interrogate this theme of ‘Pathologies’ in its inaugural conference, in order to provide an intellectual focus for a wide range of researchers, lecturers, and postgraduates interested in the interdisciplinary study of literature, arts, and science, from countries across the globe. Conference panels and papers examine the relationship between pathology and the arts from the early modern period to the present; in textual and visual culture; in film, novels, poetry, drama, short stories, and ‘fantasy television’; and in national cultures ranging from Norway to India to South Africa.
RCLAS hopes to foster this type of interdisciplinary, cross-period, international research in its current and future projects. Forthcoming plans are to digitise the Reports of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, founded in 1831. The digitised Reports will be made available online, free of charge, and we hope that they will provide an invaluable resource for scholars interested in the relationships between scientific and literary communities. A RCLAS will also establish a Literature and Science Reading Room at the University of Glamorgan, accessible by appointment; it will hold lecture and seminar series; and its website is being updated constantly with useful links, resources, and general information. If you have a specific query, or would like to be kept informed of RCLAS’s plans and development, please inform one of the conference organisers (Rachel Hewitt, Andy Smith, Jeff Wallace, or Martin Willis) during the course of the conference, or email
Conference Schedule: Outline
With the exception of the drinks reception and conference dinner, all events will take place in the Glamorgan Business Centre (GBC), marked 12 on the campus map.
For details regarding the titles of panels, and the papers included, please see pages 4-6.
For abstracts detailing the theme of each paper, please see pages 9-30.
Conference Day One: Monday 20th August
10-10.45: Registration, Coffee and Welcome (GBC foyer and Room 5)
11.00-12.00: Plenary Lecture One (Main Hall (aka Rooms 3 and 4)):
Chair: Dr. Martin Willis
Professor Jonathan Sawday (Strathclyde): ‘Minds, Bodies, Machines, and Artificial Humans on the Eve of the Enlightenment’
12.00-13.00: Lunch (Rooms 6 and 7)
13.00-14.30: Panel Session 1 (see detailed schedule for room locations)
14.30-15.00: Coffee (Room 5)
15.00-16.30: Panel Session 2 (see detailed schedule for room locations)
16.30- 17.00: Break
17.00-18.00: Plenary Lecture Two (Main Hall (aka Rooms 3 and 4)):
Chair: Professor Andrew Smith
Professor Kelly Hurley (Colorado): “Hallucinatory Flu”: Psychology, Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Medicine in the BODY SNATCHERS films
18.15-19.00: Drinks reception (art gallery, in Ty Crawshay block, marked 1 on the campus map)
19.00: Conference dinner (The Gallery Restaurant, marked 17 on the campus map)
21:00: Informal after-dinner drinks (open to all), at the Otley Arms, Forest Road, Treforest. The Otley Arms is a 5 min walk from the University Campus, and serves excellent ale and beer. See page 31 of this conference pack for a map of Treforest showing the Otley Arms.
Conference Day Two: Tuesday 21st August
10:00-11.30: Panel Session 3 (see detailed schedule for room locations)
11:30-12:00: Coffee (Room 5)
12:00-13:00: Plenary Lecture Three: (Main Hall (aka Rooms 3 and 4)):
Chair: Professor Jeff Wallace
Professor Tim Armstrong (Royal Holloway): ‘The Rest is Weather’: Historical Pathology and the Limitations of Trauma
13:00-14:00: Lunch (Rooms 6 and 7)
14:00-15.30: Panel Session 4 (see detailed schedule for locations)
15.30-16.00: Coffee (Room 5)
16.00-17.30: Panel Session 5 (see detailed schedule for locations)
17.30: Thanks, and end of conference.
Detailed Schedule of Panel Sessions, and Papers
For abstracts detailing the theme of each paper, please see pages 7-
Panel Session 1:
Monday, 20th August, 13:00 – 14:30
Room 10: Gothic Bodies
Chair: Andrew Smith (Glamorgan)
1. Elizabeth Andrews (Stirling): ‘Fat: A Gothic Body’
2. Peter Heymans (Vrije Universiteit Brussel): ‘“And I Had Selected His Features as Beautiful. Beautiful”: Changing Species’ Identities and the Discourse of the Beautiful and the Sublime in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’
3. Mair Rigby (Cardiff): ‘Death Infecting Life: Gothic Homophobia from Frankenstein to AIDS’
Main Hall (aka rooms 3 and 4): Pathologising Visual Culture
Chair: Rachel Hewitt (Glamorgan)
1. Elizabeth Lee (Dickinson): ‘Ivan Albright’s Grotesque Bodies’
2. Laura Meixner (Cornell): ‘The Pathic Body and Mechanical Reproduction in Nineteenth-Century French and American Visual Culture’
3. Lisa Otty (Edinburgh): ‘Aesthetic Anatomies: The “Literary” and the “Visual” in the Corpus of Art’
Room 1: Pathologies at the Fin-de-Siècle (1)
Chair: Jeff Wallace (Glamorgan)
1. Justin Sausman (Birkbeck): ‘Spiritualism and Pathology at the Fin-de-Siècle’
2. Merja Makinen (Middlesex): ‘Rethinking the Post-Natal in The Yellow Wallpaper’
3. Mackenzie Bartlett (Birkbeck): ‘“Always of a Painful and Injurious Character”: The Pathologisation of Laughter in the Late Nineteenth Century’
Panel Session 2:
Monday, 20th August, 15:00 – 16:30
Main Hall (aka rooms 3 and 4) : Pathologies 1600-1800
Chair: Martin Willis (Glamorgan)
1. Scott A. Nowka (Salem State): ‘Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and the “Disease” of Materialism’
2. Olivia Smith (Queen Mary): ‘A Socrates and a Simpleton: John Locke’s Medical Decorum’
3. Rachel Hewitt (Glamorgan): ‘“Eyes to the Blind”: Telescopes, Theodolites, and Failing Eyesight in Romantic Landscape Poetry’
Room 1: Modernist Pathology
Chair: Jeff Wallace (Glamorgan)
1. Anna Burrells (Birmingham): ‘From Ambivalence to Antipathy: A Pathology of the Machinic Body in Late Modernism’
2. Maria del Mar Perez-Gil (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria): ‘Well-Shaped Heads and Noble Minds: The Rhetoric of Moral Health in Sarah Grand’s Adnam’s Orchard’
Room 10: Pathologies of Poetry and Drama
Chair: Andrew Smith (Glamorgan)
1. John Goodby (Swansea): ‘“Glandular Fevers”: Sex, Science and Politics in Dylan Thomas’s 18 Poems’
2. Jed Chandler (Swansea): ‘Why do the Witches in Macbeth have Excess Facial Hair?’
3. Gianna Bouchard (Anglia Ruskin): ‘Pathologies of Performance’
Panel Session 3:
Tuesday, 21st August, 10:00 – 11:30
Main Hall (aka Rooms 3 and 4) : Autopsies
Chair: Olivia Smith (Queen Mary)
1. Stacy Gillis (Newcastle): ‘Body of Evidence: Forensics and the Corpse in Contemporary Detective Fiction’
2. Nora Simonhjell (Agder): ‘The Fragmented Body: “Autopsy” and “Biopsy” in Two Contemporary Norwegian Novels’
3. Sarah Dauncey (Warwick): ‘Forensic Urgency in André Brink’s A Dry White Season: Autopsy, Evidence, and Political Action’
Room 10: Pathology and Creative Production
Chair: Martin Willis (Glamorgan)
1. Reina van der Wiel (Birkbeck): ‘Trauma as Site of Identity: The Cases of Frida Kahlo and Jeanette Winterson’
2. Alexandra Tankard (Liverpool): ‘“The Charm of Degeneration and Decay”: Aubrey Beardsley and Pathological Art Criticism’
3. Jennifer Lokash (Memorial): ‘Never the “Bodiless Thought”: The Pathology of Byron’s Poetry’
Panel Session 4:
Tuesday, 21st August, 14:00 – 15:30
Room 1: Pathologies at the Fin-de-Siècle (2)
Chair: Jeff Wallace (Glamorgan)
1. Elizabeth McClure (Maryland): ‘Pathologising Humanity: Pain in H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau’
2. Jennifer Fraser (Birkbeck): ‘A Woman’s Scientific Intervention in the National Body: Clorinda Matto de Turner’s Herencia, novela sociológica’
Main Hall (aka Rooms 3 and 4): Theorising the Body
Chair: Martin Willis (Glamorgan)
1. Aidan Tynan (Cardiff): ‘Materia Medica: Deleuze’s Homeopathic Reading of Spinoza’s Ethics and the Diagnostic Transformation of Politics’
2. Katherine Angell (Queen Mary): ‘The Concept of Monstrosity in Nineteenth-Century Medical Thought’
3. Mayra Rivera Rivera (Amsterdam): ‘Virus – Reloaded’
Panel Session 5:
Tuesday, 21st August, 16:00 – 17:30:
Main Hall (aka Rooms 3 and 4): Pathology, Now! (1)
Chair: Andrew Smith (Glamorgan)
1. Becky Munford (Cardiff): ‘Bodies of Knowledge: The Pathologisation of the Female Scientist in Fantasy Television’
2. Mrinalini Greedharry (Goldsmiths): ‘Psychoanalysis Diagnoses Colonialism: From Berkeley-Hill to Bhabha and Beyond’
3. Alistair Brown (Durham): ‘Body Recognising Mind: Demonic and Embodied Knowledge in A.S. Byatt’s A Whistling Woman’
Room 10: Pathology, Now! (2)
Chair: Jane Aaron (Glamorgan)
1. Ceri Davies (Swansea): ‘“My Genitals Have Been the Most Significant Thing that Ever Happened to Me”: Hermaphroditic Pathology’
2. Michael Greaney (Lancaster): ‘Postmodern Insomnia: The Art of Sleep in Contemporary Fiction’
3. Rachel Carroll (Teesside): ‘Allergic to Everything: Environmental Illness, Pathology, and Power, in Todd Haynes’s Safe’
Abstracts of the Conference Papers
These are arranged in alphabetical order, according to author surname.
Elizabeth Andrews (Stirling):
‘Fat: A Gothic Body’
‘To be fat is…a horror of Gothic proportions’ (H&Z 2000, 9), argue Horner and Zlosnik in their discussion of Eaton Stannard Barrett’s early nineteenth-century Gothic parody The Heroine (1813). This fear of fatness has continued and intensified in the following centuries, and this paper will focus on the representation of the fat female body in Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle (1977). These ‘Gothic proportions’ threaten to smother, to destabilise the human form so that it is no longer recognisable. ‘Gothic proportions’ are larger than life, they push against and bend the boundaries that cultures establish because Gothic, as a genre, engages with the limitations that society imposes and is important in what Fred Botting describes as the ‘reconstruction or transformation of limits’ (Botting 1996, 8). These proportions also transgress the Gothic aesthetic and comment, self-reflexively, on its own conventions. Using Julia Kristeva’s ideas of abjection, Kelly Hurley’s explication of the Gothic body, theories of monstrosity and the grotesque, I shall explore the effects of the representation of fatness and the ways in which fat can itself be termed Gothic. Fat is culturally pathologised, demonised and abjected, and this mainstream ideology is both maintained and interrogated by Gothic texts in the exaggeration and externalisation of this implicit view. Focusing on Lady Oracle, Gothic tropes of being buried alive, loss of subjectivity, obsessions with the surface, Thingness and Otherness can be illustrated by the representation of the fat body. Joan’s fat assumes a separate identity, that of The Fat Lady, who haunts her daydreams at moments of crisis. The Fat Lady is every woman and none; she has ‘a face like a breast minus the nipple’ (Lady Oracle, p.321). This archetypal figure symbolises the conflicting connotations associated with fat; she is absurd, comfortingly safe, feminine yet un-nurturing and dangerous. The Fat Lady is matter animated. She returns to a post-fat Joan as ‘all the flesh that used to be mine’ (Lady Oracle, p.320), ‘like a gelatin [sic] shell, my ghost, my angel’ (Lady Oracle, p.321).Fat is both part of the body and independent of it, fluid and solid, progressive and transgressive; fat is Gothic.
Katherine Angell (Queen Mary):
‘The Concept of Monstrosity in Nineteenth-Century Medical Thought’
In this paper I discuss the concept of human monstrosity in nineteenth century medical thought. Primarily analysing medical lectures and journals of the period my research provides evidence of an inconsistency and an absence of a definite concept of monstrosity within the nineteenth century. I concentrate on the construction and use of classification systems in the definition and diagnosis of human monstrosity, and the battle between experimental science and mythological tales.
I argue that there were numerous difficulties in accurately diagnosing monstrosities and classifying them within science. Many teratologists used conflicting and inconsistent criteria for classification. Some doctors were not happy with the concentration on congenital deformities (championed by Geoffroy Saint Hilaire) whilst others disagreed with the process of classification itself. The irregularity of natural monsters made for inconsistent diagnosis and for many resulted in retrospective diagnosis of mythical monsters and the examinations of popular ‘freaks’. This in turn created a suspicion of teratology by some members of the medical profession who were unconvinced of its scientific merits.
Teratologists had to battle with the power of superstition and myth, not only in the public consciousness but also from within their own profession. This battle was made more difficult without sound scientific evidence to counter claim the traditionalists. Teratology gave prominence to experimental embryology to discover the cause of monstrosity. However few scientifically proven causes were identified within the century.
Teratology continually debated over the correct diagnosis, and the possible causes of monstrosity, providing a changing and fluid medical definition. Their language was characterised by the attempted removal of mythical explanations and an uneasy acceptance of experimental science. I argue that their discourse provided a space where the monster had multiple diagnosis and cause, and was studied as an individual. There was wide ranging debate and new experiments in science, which led to a transformation of understanding of monstrosity in the nineteenth century. This new understanding spread across medicine, into the social consciousness and into literary representation. The language of teratology can produce new readings of nineteenth century texts as well as provide fruitful debate between science and literature.
Tim Armstrong (Royal Holloway)
Plenary Lecture Three: ‘“The Rest is Weather”: Historical Pathology and the Limitations of Trauma’
This paper concerns itself with the notion of wounding which is central to trauma studies, and which is therefore incorporated into notions of inherited historical trauma. I begin with the ending of perhaps the best-known recent investigation of this topic, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and its declaration ‘the rest is weather’. What, in the context of the haunting inheritance represented by Beloved, could ‘weather’ mean?
In answering this question, I traverse a range of writings (by Melville, Stowe, Vashon, Chesnutt, Morrison and others) on the inheritance of slavery, and look at the way on which ‘weather’ signals an alternative psychology to that postulated by the notion of trauma: a psychology predicated on localism, contingency and a mobile, particulate body, rather than the historical fixity and inherited wounding implied by notions of trauma. The tradition of weather is one of relative freedom; though it seems to have always existed in a dialectical relation to the historical imprinting suggested by trauma.