9th Annual McGill University Graduate Student Symposium on Language and
Literature
"Blood Lust, Blood Loss: Representations of Struggle and Desire"
March 22 & 23, 2003
Montreal, Quebec
Blood and Ink: Doctors, Healing, and Testimony in Twentieth-Century Narratives
Traces of the intersections between literature and medicine date as far back
as the Greeks, with Greek empiricism and Epicurean rhetoric first formulated
in the Hippocratic writings, and the words "medicine for the soul" inscribed
at the entrance of the library of Thebes. John Keats, Anton Chekhov, and
William Carlos Williams, to name but a few, had medical training, and
countless other physicians, such as Oliver Sacks and Richard Selzer, have
written about their practices in ways more literary than scientific.
This panel calls for papers considering representations of doctors, nurses, or
less conventional healers, and healing in 20th-century literatures.
Twentieth-century narratives abound with famous doctors or healers such as
Toni Morrison’s Baby Suggs and Amy Denver in Beloved; Toni Cade Bambara’s
Minnie Ransom in The Salt Eaters; Betonie in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony;
Hana, "more patient than nurse," in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient;
Dr. Simon Jordan in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace; the dentist Aurelio Escovar
in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s "One of These Days"; the gynaecologist Dr. Skreta
in Milan Kundera’s Farewell Waltz; and the lobotomising and castrating doctors
in Ellison’s Invisible Man, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, or
Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.
In this panel, we hope to explore the domains of wards, asylums, clinics,
nursing homes, but also of shaman huts, and kivas; the testimonies of and
relationships between doctors/healers and patients, and the power relations at
play therein; the possible or precluded articulations of trauma and their
relation to healing and the scar; the effects of institutionalization; and the
problematic proposition that to erase identity in the cases of certain
"others," is to "cure" them.
Please send 250 word proposals on these and similar topics to Pauline
Morel[pmorel1@po-box.mcgill.ca] by February 1st
Conference website address:
http://www.arts.mcgill.ca/programs/english/symposium9.html
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From the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List
CFP@english.upenn.edu
Full Information at
http://www.english.upenn.edu/CFP/
or write Erika Lin: elin@english.upenn.edu
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