“I guess I’m just nervous, then”: Neuropathology and Edith Wharton’s Exploration of Interior Geographies

Plock, Vike Martina

doi:10.1057/9780230278004_10

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…For example, there is a chapter in Vike Plock's book Joyce , Medicine and Modernity () which deals with neuroscience and the “Eumaeus” episode in Ulysses . Plock also has an article in Neurology and Modernity called ‘”I guess I'm just nervous then”: Neuropathology and Edith Whaton's Exploration of Interior Geographies’ (2012) which considers Wharton's Ethan Frome (1996) in relation to neurology. There is an emerging cluster of work on neurology and Beckett such as Laura Salisbury's article ‘”What is the Word”: Beckett's Aphasic Modernism’ (2008) (which draws on the work of a number of late‐nineteenth and early‐twentieth‐century neurologists) and Laura Salisbury and Chris Code's article ‘Jackson's Parrot: Samuel Beckett, Aphasic Speech Automatisms, and Psychosomatic Language’ in Talking Normal : Literature , Speech Disorders , and Disability ed.…”

Section: Literature and Neurology: Historical Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neurology and Modernist Literature

Christensen

2014

Literature Compass

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In recent years, there has been a surge in work by literary critics which considers the literature of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries in relation to neurology. This builds upon an already substantial body of work which has studied the literature of this period in relation to psychology or psychoanalysis. The work of medical historians is crucial for literary critics seeking to tease out the complex relationship between psychology and neurology in this period and also in establishing that psychology must form a central aspect of historically grounded studies of neurology and literature which focus on the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Focusing on neurology and psychology alongside one another in relation to modernist literature demands a new account of Freud and Freudianism. Neurology also needs to be seen as a key element of embodiment in modernist literature. The first part of the article explores these issues. The second part considers recent work by literary critics on neurology and literature and is split into two sections. The first surveys recent work which gives a historically grounded account of neurology and modernist literature, touching on work which considers authors such as Samuel Beckett and Virginia Woolf. The second section focuses on works which examine modernist literature in relation to the neurology and/or neuroscience of today, questioning the efficacy of such an approach. Neurology and Psychology: Learning from the History of MedicineIn this article, I focus on studies which consider the relationship between neurology (the study of the nervous system in health and disease) and literature from the late-nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries, paying particular attention to works which deal with modernism and modernist literature from the first decades of the twentieth century as this is my own area of expertise. There have been a number of studies which focus on early-twentieth-century modernist literature in relation to either psychoanalysis or psychology: Mark S. Micale's The Mind of Modernism (2004), Judith Ryan's The Vanishing Subject (1991), Lyndsey Stonebridge's The Destructive Element (1998), Kylie Valentine's Psychoanalysis, Psychiatry and Modernist Literature (2003), to name but a few. Perhaps ever since Lionel Trilling wrote in 1947 that '[t]he Freudian psychology is the only systematic account of the human mind which […] deserves to stand beside the chaotic mass of psychological insights which literature has accumulated through the centuries' (42-3), Freudian psychoanalysis in particular has towered above other forms of psychology as both a mode of literary interpretation and a historical context for modernism. As Micale writes, '[a]n astonishing share of the scholarship about this subject continues to take the form of influence studies of psychoanalysis in which Freud -and occasionally Jung -are presented as the sole exemplars of psychological modernism' (7). However, despite Micale's claim, made in 2004, there had already been a number o...

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Section: Literature and Neurology: Historical Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%