Skip to Main Content

Pathologies of Motion: Historical Thinking in Medicine, Aesthetics, and Poetics

Online ISBN:
9780300268645
Print ISBN:
9780300243963
Publisher:
Yale University Press
Book

Pathologies of Motion: Historical Thinking in Medicine, Aesthetics, and Poetics

Kevis Goodman
Kevis Goodman
University of California, Berkeley
Find on
Published online:
21 September 2023
Published in print:
17 January 2023
Online ISBN:
9780300268645
Print ISBN:
9780300243963
Publisher:
Yale University Press

Abstract

This book offers a new account of later eighteenth century medicine, aesthetics, and poetics as overlapping forms of knowledge increasingly worried about the relationship between the geographical mobility of persons displaced from home and the internal motions constituting the physiology and sensibility of their moving bodies. Looking beyond narratives about medicine’s and art’s shared therapeutic or harmonizing function, the book explores the development of aesthetics and poetics in relation to a different—once-central but since underexplored—area eighteenth century environmental medicine: pathology. Pathology (“medical semiotics”) was not diagnosis nor classification but rather an art of reading, offering sophisticated ways of apprehending the multiple conditions and causes (the converging internal, external, remote, proximate, and other forces) present and discernible in and as their embodied effects, not hidden or separate from them. How might literary studies’ understanding of aesthetics and poetics change when these are considered not in terms of medicine’s attempts to accommodate bodies and minds to their historical or natural environments, but in terms of pathology’s grasp of the dislocations opening up between them? This study argues that Enlightenment medicine’s confrontations with the troubled aspects of mobility were continued and developed within later eighteenth-century aesthetic theory and some of the poetics forged at the turn of the next century, including theories of reading. This approach can offer a way of attending to the distinctive historiography carried out within aesthetics and poetics not by reference to external context but by understanding their own intrinsic historical thinking.

Contents
Close
This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

Close

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

View Article Abstract & Purchase Options

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Close