{"title":"Diagnosing Desire: Imaginative Experiments with Sexuality and the Nerves","authors":"Ira Halpern","doi":"10.1353/lm.2023.a911450","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2023.a911450","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: American fiction often tells us that there is something sick about romantic desire. But the writers who I discuss in this article told their readers this even as they critiqued the medical profession's pathologization of women's desires and non-normative sexual subjectivities. In particular, this article looks at two literary responses to the medical notion that marriage was a cure for hysteria and other nervous disorders: Oliver Wendell Holmes's A Mortal Antipathy (1885) and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's Doctor Zay (1886). While the medical rhetoric of nervous pathology could be repressive and stigmatizing, these fictions sought to reclaim and reimagine the medical treatment of nervous desire in subversive ways.","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532788","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Editor's Foreword: Remembering Carol Donley","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/lm.2023.a911437","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2023.a911437","url":null,"abstract":"Editor's Foreword:Remembering Carol Donley Michael Blackie The field of Literature and Medicine has lost one of its most passionate early proponents. Carol Donley, cofounder of Hiram College's Center for Literature and Medicine and the Literature and Medicine book series published by Kent State University Press, among other remarkable achievements, died this past April from complications of Covid. I met Carol in 2008, when I joined the faculty at Hiram to teach in the Biomedical Humanities program there, the first of its kind in the US, and to participate in the Center's programming. But her influence on me as a mentor began years before, when in the Modern Language Association publication Teaching Literature and Medicine I came across a course she had codesigned and taught at Hiram called \"The Tyranny of the Normal.\"1 What an inspiring gift. I developed a course based on Carol's class that followed it closely, down to the name. But as I became more comfortable asking the kinds of questions the course modeled, and as my knowledge of the field expanded, I renamed it \"Perils of the Normal.\" I've since taught numerous permutations of the class in two baccalaureate programs and two medical schools over the last twenty years, each iteration becoming more reflective of the dynamic field Carol helped create. Another example of Carol's vision for what we now call the Health Humanities is captured in an essay she wrote for Literature and Medicine's 10th anniversary.2 Beginning by praising the journal for its analysis of healers beyond the white, heroic male physician to celebrate contributions from nursing and other allied health professions, she then puts forth a list of research topics for future work. The list is prescient. It anticipates developments in the field, like the emphasis on illness experiences as a genre and the importance of narrative, while also foreseeing the challenges of our present moment. For example, she demands that our scholarly agendas \"include more research on images of black Americans as healers and on the images of other minorities [End Page 1] in America (Native American, Hispanic, Asian American)\" (30). She provides a series of guiding questions for this work, such as \"What do healers within these groups mean to the members of the groups?\" and \"What limits do the prejudices of the majority impose on them?\" (30). Another research agenda she identifies is the essential but largely unacknowledged contributions of informal caregivers. \"We need,\" she argues, \"studies of the images of healers out in the streets and in the homes, members of the family, as often as not, who have taken on that role\" (31). These questions are as relevant today as they were in 1991 and make clear how much work remains to be done in the field—and in the pages of this journal. I came across Carol's reflective essay when I was writing my own for Literature and Medicine's 40th anniversary. Reading it reminded me of how much I've gained from her mentorship,","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":"199 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532539","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Paraphrasing Finitude: Seeking Refuge from Death in Thomas Bernhard's Wittgenstein's Nephew","authors":"Madalina Meirosu","doi":"10.1353/lm.2023.a911449","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2023.a911449","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Thomas Bernhard's novella Wittgenstein's Nephew is typically read as a quasi-memoir about Bernhard's relationship with Paul Wittgenstein, the nephew of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. But Bernhard is up to something else. The novella dramatizes the different ways that language and storytelling defend against anxieties associated with illness and mortality. Bernhard is able to show this defense mechanism at work while simultaneously crafting a broken narrative that tells a story of its own, a story of an illness that cannot be contained in usual narrative threads and that asks for new forms of storytelling. He thus reveals at once both the concealing and disclosive potential of language in the face of illness as he finds innovative ways to embody the experience of illness in the very fabric of the text.","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532784","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/lm.2023.a911454","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2023.a911454","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532786","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Recovering a Literary Legacy: The Life of Delores Phillips","authors":"Delia Steverson","doi":"10.1353/lm.2023.a911442","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2023.a911442","url":null,"abstract":"Recovering a Literary Legacy:The Life of Delores Phillips Delia Steverson (bio) In 2002, after suffering a heart attack, author Delores Phillips miraculously drove herself to a Cleveland hospital. Recovering from complications during her hospitalization, Delores later recalled to her only daughter, Shalana Harris, \"Man, I should've died.\" But Shalana rebuffed, \"No, there's a reason why you didn't die. You still have more life to live.\"1 Less than two years later, in 2004, Shalana's prophetic utterances appeared to be fulfilled when Phillips published The Darkest Child, the only novel she would publish in her lifetime. The story takes place in the fictional town of Pakersfield, Georgia, in 1958, and follows Rozelle Quinn—a resourceful yet cruel and manipulative mother—and her ten children as they attempt to reconcile generational trauma and escape racism and poverty in the Jim Crow south. The narrative is told through the lens of Tangy Mae, the titular \"darkest\" of all Rozelle's children, who believes that her education is the quickest pathway for fleeing her abusive household. The novel won the Black Caucus American Library Association First Novelist Award in 2005 and was short-listed for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award that same year. With the reception of The Darkest Child, Phillips appeared to have a promising literary future. But after a short and brutal battle with pancreatic cancer, Delores passed away in relative obscurity at the age of 63 in 2014. I was introduced to The Darkest Child in 2017 by a friend and colleague who knew I was researching representations of disability in African American literature. She suggested that the novel—with its attention to a variety of human experiences, including deafness (one of Rozelle's children is deaf and creates her own form of sign language) and madness (there is debate if Rozelle is \"mad\" or just downright evil)—might be a rich text to enhance my scholarly pursuits. When I read the novel, I found it incredibly poignant, funny, hopeful, and tragic, all at the same time, and I was driven to find out more about this mysterious author. Much to my dismay, other than a short biography [End Page 45] in the back of the book, a bare Wikipedia page, and Phillips's obituary, there seemed to be no substantial information about this formidable artist. Thus armed with Phillips's obituary, I reached out to Shalana on Facebook—and surprisingly, she messaged me back. After a few months of communication, I flew to Cleveland, Ohio, where Shalana and Phillips's sister Linda Miller reside, to discover more about this amazing writer whom I never had the opportunity to meet. Opening their homes and their lives to me through several interviews—over Linda's homemade desserts and Shalana's tuna sandwiches—they shared honest and transparent details about their sister/mother. Over the years, we would sift through boxes of what we would determine were pages of Phillips's unpublished writings, which had been tucked away in Lin","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532540","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Contagion and the Body Politic: De Quincey on the 1830 Revolution in France","authors":"Roxanne Covelo","doi":"10.1353/lm.2023.a911452","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2023.a911452","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Writing in the fall of 1830, in the period immediately following France's révolution de juillet , Thomas De Quincey predicts the imminent breakdown of social order in Britain. In his political writing for Blackwood's Magazine over the course of this period, he consistently frames the threat of French-style revolution in terms of the body politic and its vulnerability to contagion, often playing on the meaning of a country's \"constitution.\" In 1831, upon the introduction of the Reform Bill, his worst fears appear to have been confirmed, and he now presents the upcoming revolution almost as a fait accompli. De Quincey's dire predictions fit into a larger framework of nineteenth-century alarmism surrounding contagion, \"sympathy,\" and the collective action of the mob. This article examines the presence and influence of these concepts in De Quincey's political writing for Blackwood's over the period of 1830 to 1832, the year the Bill was successfully passed.","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":"491 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532787","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Foreword to Front Matter: <i>Recovery</i>.","authors":"Michael Blackie","doi":"10.1353/lm.2023.a911438","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2023.a911438","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":"41 1","pages":"5-7"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140854038","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}