Healing Self-Portraits? Representing Illness in Poetry, Prose, and Film

Workshop D: seminar room P106 (2nd floor, Philosophicum)

Susanne Rohr (Hamburg), Miriam Strube (Paderborn)

 

1. Marc Priewe (Duisburg-Essen), "Too many my diseases to cite": Anne Bradstreet's Pathographies

2. Tanja N. Aho (SUNY Buffalo), "Mad to be Mad: Gendered Narratives of Mental Disorder in Mary Jane Ward’s The Snake Pit (1946) and Harold Maine’s If a Man Be Mad (1947)"

3. Jan D. Kucharzewski (Hamburg), "Survival of the Sickest? Cognitive Disorders and the Question of Agency in Contemporary Narratives of the Self"

4. Tanja Reiffenrath (Paderborn), "Self, Interrupted: Mediating Illness and Recovery in Oliver Sack’s A Leg to Stand on"

5. Yvonne Gutenberger (JGU Mainz), "Investigations of Self and Pathology in Contemporary American Life Writing"

6. Katja Sarkowsky (Augsburg), "Explaining the unsettled self? Reading and Control in Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (2008) and Siri Hustvedt’s The Shaking Woman (2010)"

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Contact:

Prof. Dr. Marc Priewe
marc.priewe@uni-due.de

Tanja N. Aho
Tanja.Aho@amer.phil.uni-erlangen.de

Dr. Jan D. Kucharzewski
jan.kucharzewski@uni-hamburg.de

Tanja Reiffenrath, M.A.
tanja.reiffenrath@upb.de

Yvonne Gutenberger, M.A.
gutenb@uni-mainz.de

Dr. Katja Sarkowsky, Jun.-Prof.
katja.sarkowsky@phil.uni-augsburg.de

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George Gusdorf famously (or infamously) declared that there are certain conditions and limits for autobiographical writing. A closer look at his exploration of these conditions and limits reveals a concern peculiar to Western man, "a concern that has been of good use in his systematic conquest of the universe." Consequently, Gusdorf defines the autobiography as the success story of a bourgeois man of public life who uses a rhetoric of assertion to present his writing as a document of his life, a mimetic self-representation, using a linear and progressive form of narration.

However, Gusdorf’s normative model has been strongly challenged by many scholars (for example, Donna C. Stanton, Estelle Jelinek, Mary Mason, Sidonie Smith, Joanne Braxton, and Anne E. Goldman), who stress the importance of autobiographies as a form of resistance, as reclamation of a utopian vision, as a means for the continuing search for identity or as therapeutic.

In this workshop, we aim to explore artistic and/or therapeutic representations of illness – be those illnesses mental or physical – in American autobiographical texts. We want to investigate how illness has been narrated and how the recent interest in representing illness challenges and enlarges the traditional form.

Following Foucault and other prominent theorists in the field (including the fairly young academic field of Disability Studies as represented, for instance, by Rachel Adams), we start from the assumption that concepts like sanity/health and its counterpart illness are social constructions that are evidence of a whole network of discourses on social norms active in a particular society at a given time. As such, they are open to continuous modification and re-formulation. With their capacity to transcend, sublimate and undermine, the arts play a vital role in negotiating this persistent process of revision.

Accordingly, the way in which individual artists represent physical or mental health and illness can tell us a lot about a society’s predominant ideological structure. We invite contributions to this workshop that consider the representation of illness and sanity/health within this nexus and study the various artistic techniques used to depict the fragile relationship between health and illness in this light.

We explicitly invite contributions from various genres, from prose, poetry or film, and from early examples to the present date, as we also aim to investigate the relationship between developments in American society and the particular aesthetics of the representations

Key concerns of this workshop will be:

• What are the new challenges to the traditional autobiographical form in narrating illness?
• Which aesthetic strategies, both in literature and film, are employed in representing the illness of body or mind?
• What is the function of these texts for the narrating self as well as for society at large?

Texts under consideration might include:

• Robert Lowell, Life Studies, 1960
•  Anne Sexton, Live or Die, 1966
• Audre Lorde, The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde, 1997
• M. Stefan Strozier, Schizophrenia Poetry, 2006
• Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, 1963
• Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals, 1980
• Bob Owen, Roger’s Recovery from AIDS, 1987
• Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted, 1993
• Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation, 1994
• Kenneth Hall, Asperger’s Syndroem, the Universe and Everything, 2000
• Siri Hustvedt, A Shaking Woman or The History of My Nerves, 2010
• Tarnation. Dir. Jonathan Caouette. Caouette-Winter, 2003
• Temple Grandin. Dir. Mick Jackson. HBO Films, 2010
• 50/50. Dir. Jonathan Levine. Summit Entertainment, 2011