Narratives of Self – Life Sciences and Life Writing In the Biomedical Age

Workshop J: seminar room P105 (2nd floor, Philosophicum)

Karin Hoepker (Erlangen-Nürnberg), Eva-S. Zehelein (Bonn)

 

1. Stephan Besser (Amsterdam), "'I Am No One'. The Dissolution of Self as a Trope of Contemporary Neuroculture"

2. Henrike Lehnguth (Oldenburg), "Psychopathy and the Techniques of Self-Narration in Dexter, American Psycho, and Ted Bundy: Conversations with a Killer"

3. Dirk Vanderbeke (Jena), "The Mental Detective: Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn"

– coffee break –

4. Klaus J. Milich (Dartmouth College), "'We Are Family': Genetic Genealogy and Life Narratives"

5. W. Roy Smythe (Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine), "Cell(f) Comprehension"

6. Martin Holtz (Greifswald), "The Pathological Protagonist in Recent Films by Martin Scorsese"

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Contact:

Dr. Stephan Besser
S.Besser@uva.nl

Dr. Henrike Lehnguth
henrike.lehnguth@uni-oldenburg.de

Prof. Dr. Dirk Vanderbeke
vanderbeke@t-online.de

Prof. Dr. Klaus Milich
Klaus.J.Milich@Dartmouth.edu

W. Roy Smythe, MDr
smythe@swmail.sw.org

Dr. Martin Holtz
mh010176@yahoo.de

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Recent decades have seen significant research progress in the life sciences, in areas such as genetics, cell biology, neuroscience or “new brain sciences”, immunology and oncology, while its repercussions on conceptions of self and social formations remain largely underexplored. The life sciences have made inroads into arenas where they impact sensitive social issues such as the criminal justice system, educational practices, diagnosis and treatment of children's problems at school (e.g. the vast increase in diagnosis of ADS), and of course mental health practice and policies in general. New branches of diagnostic and pharmaceutical industries open up fields and venues of marketing which target individual consumers over notions of mental and physical health as issues of self-empowerment and individual responsibility. Their influence is based primarily on the persuasiveness of statistical probabilities and risk assessment. Critics have not only turned against pharmaceutical marketing and the over-liberal prescription policies of a “Prozac Nation” but describe these developments as part of a new 'biomedical regime' which defines the individual no longer in terms of ‘normality’ and digression, but of in terms of an omnipresent risk, which might be greater or smaller. And yet, as is profitably suggested by the biomedical industry, prudent and cautious citizens may hedge their individually determinable risks by foresight, responsible behavior, and a strict regime of dietary and preventive pharmaco-medical measures.

As recent notions of 'health management' illustrate, the life sciences, no longer separable from their technoscientific applications, have multiple ways of challenging conceptions of self, identity, and individuality, of normality vs. pathology, and illness vs. health. The humanities are best equipped to address these issues, debate the political and ethical challenges emerging from these new developments, and renegotiate conceptions of self and identity. Many areas of cultural production already seek to chart the emergence and spread of new ways of thinking about human beings: fiction and non-fiction interventions into (psycho)pathologically marked discourses, trauma narratives, confessional narratives (ranging from religious to online blogs), and narratives of illness or disability (ranging from crime fiction to TV-series such as Dexter or Breaking Bad and to a recent surge in narratives on Capgrass, Asperger's, and related syndromes). They probe for instance how our notions of individuality and self are connected to our perceptions of our minds and brains, and they open up a search for new techniques of narrating lives that may explore and intervene against prevalent rhetorics of biopolitical determinism.

The workshop seeks to investigate these new techniques and practices of narrating and negotiating selves which we see emerging and developing in response to a major shift in the disciplinary landscape of biopolitics and the Western subject. We seek to address questions such as: What techniques of self-narration does a “neurochemical self” (N. Rose) require? To what extent does renewed attention on 'pathological protagonists' effectively dislocate notions of social normativity? How do pharmacological and genomic discourses impact our notions of race? How do they impact gender (for instance in terms of “Gender Medicine”)? What repercussions does the advent of the post-genomic subject have on the inscriptions of class divides, citizenship, and in the context of the family and human rights? We invite papers on all genres, e.g. literary fiction, creative non-fiction, life writing, drama and performance art, music, TV-series, film or blogs with a special focus on the late 20th and 21st century. Theoretical papers on biomedical and literary discourses of neuroscientific phenomena, of brain imagining, brain & mind, and qualia-debates (cf. e.g. C. de Sousa or Daniel C. Dennett) are as welcome as contributions developing comparative historical trajectories.