Reading Bodies
On the benefits of reading for wellbeing and bibliotherapy in the community, take a look at Exeter City of Literature’s Bibliotherapy Skills programme. Their website includes a literature review on bibliotherapy produced by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health.
The Reading Bodies Research Network has met regularly since November 2023 to discuss our project research questions, updates on our chosen topics, and development of shared interests which are grouped into 3 themes: gender and the body; society, illness and representation; transnational and decolonial perspectives. For more information, please visit our Network and People pages.
The first academic workshop for this project will be held at the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies in Senate House, London on 26 April 2024. Registration is free and all are welcome to attend. For more information and a link to reserve your place, please visit our events page.
By Katharine Murphy, Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature, University of Exeter, and AHRC Principal Investigator for the ‘Reading Bodies’ project.
Prof. Katharine Murphy has published an invited piece on ‘Reading Bodies in European Literatures and Cultures’ in the Multilingual Medical Humanities series of The Polyphony, hosted by the Institute for Medical Humanities, Durham University.
By Dr Kit Yee Wong, Postdoctoral Researcher in French Studies
How do European languages and literature intersect with the modern human body and identity? Can literature help us re-think the classification of bodies into social and racial categories? Surveying the history of medicine in Europe from the nineteenth century will assist with these questions.
The mid-1800s was the start of the ‘golden age’ of clinical medicine across Western Europe, when medical sciences became professionalised. Disciplines were created in new medical institutions, such as physiology, pathology, gynaecology, and anthropology, to name a few. People were measured and categorised on a grand scale.
By Danielle Hipkins, Professor of Italian Studies and Film, University of Exeter
Drawing connections with the AHRC-funded project A Girl’s Eye View 2021-2024, Prof. Danielle Hipkins reflects on audience responses to the genre of the ‘sick girl’ film.
The romantic film depends on the obstacle. Otherwise, what happens? Two people meet, fall in love, and live happily ever after. That is the outcome we want, but it’s not the story we want. It’s far too short, and likely boring.
Serious, terminal even, illness presents a narratively rich obstacle, and the canon of romantic films is strewn with lovers lost, slowly and painfully, or sometimes recovered through the sheer power of love alone. There are variations in outcome, and also in the distribution of illness: maybe he’s ill, maybe she’s ill, maybe they’re both ill. Sometimes they both survive, but usually it’s just one of them.
By Dr Kayleigh Darch, Clinical Psychologist, Yoga Teacher, Founder of Body and Mind Therapy, and Project Partner for Reading Bodies
Responding to our project strand on burnout, stress and resilience, this article reflects on two of these terms from a psychologically-informed perspective, and explores the powerful connections between mind and body.
In this short article, I would like to offer you some observations and reflections on how we understand stress and what contributes to our individual resilience. This is drawn from my experiences working as a Clinical Psychologist supporting people who are struggling with their mental health and my roles in supporting the teams who care for others. It also stems from my personal practice, ongoing learning and work as a Yoga Teacher. My two worlds of psychology and yoga are drawn together continually in my holistic approaches to supporting the body and the mind simultaneously. I hope that there is something helpful or interesting for you in this article.
By Isabel Cawthorn, PhD candidate in Hispanic Studies, University of Birmingham
Leopoldo Alas (‘Clarín’) is most prominently known as the author of La Regenta, which was published in two volumes in 1884 and 1885 and is now well ensconced in classic Spanish literature. However, aside from this realist novel, he also published hundreds of experimental short stories, of which ‘Cuervo’ was one, first appearing in the newspaper, La Justicia, in 1888. Clarín begins his short story, ‘Cuervo’, with the following lines: ‘El paisaje que se contempla desde la torre de la colegiata no tiene más defecto que el de parecer amanerado y casi casi de abanico. El pueblo, por dentro, es también risueño, y como está tan blanco, parece limpio’.[1] [‘The landscape that can be seen from the collegiate church has no other defect than appearing slightly affected and almost fan-like. The village itself is also pleasant, and because it is so white, it appears clean’.][2] The quotation foregrounds the importance of the concepts of cleanliness and ‘defect’ in relation to people and places. Specific to this story is how sanitation and disease are used to pathologise the past, making ‘Cuervo’ an interesting example of how, in late nineteenth-century Spain, pathology and illness were given a temporal significance.
By Maria Scott, Associate Professor of French Literature and Thought, University of Exeter
In 1884 a strange novel was published in Belgium by a young French woman, Marguerite Eymery Vallette, more usually known as Rachilde. The book was banned for obscenity, and a fine and prison sentence were imposed on the author. Five years later, in 1889, Monsieur Vénus was published in France, with some of its most scandalous passages and details omitted. It was accompanied by a preface by the right-wing author Maurice Barrès, who claimed that the novel would interest reflective readers primarily on account of the fascinating portrait it offered of the soul of a young virgin (the author) afflicted by an incongruous perversity. He quotes the novelist Jean Lorrain’s description of Rachilde’s limpid and ignorant eyes, concealing other eyes that search out and discover scandalous pleasures. This focus by both male authors on the female author’s strange gaze is telling: that gaze is both ignorant and knowing, a placid object of male attention that is also active and mobile and daring. Barrès recommended that Monsieur Vénus be read as ‘le spectacle d’une rare perversité’ (the spectacle of a rare perversity), as ‘un symptôme’ (a symptom), and as ‘une anatomie’ (an anatomy).[1] It is hard not to think of André Brouillet’s famous contemporaneous painting A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière (1887), which depicts the body of a supposedly perverse young woman being subjected to the fascinated medical gaze. The crucial difference is that, in the case of Monsieur Vénus, the anatomised woman stares right back.
By Louise Willder, copywriter at Penguin Books and author of Blurb Your Enthusiasm: An A-Z of Literary Persuasion (London: Oneworld Publications, 2022), a Times Book of the Year.
The one guarantee about living in a human body is that, at some stage, it will let you down. Our bodies are remarkable things, but they also age, ache, break, change, leak, bleed, scar, get infected and cause us pain. We cannot escape it, and it scares us. Consequently, fear of our bodies, of illness and imperfection, is at the heart of the literature of fear, whether a traditional English ghost story or a fantasy horror novel. ‘Body horror’ is an established genre in film, with directors such as David Cronenberg and Julia Ducournau exploring and exploiting the degeneration or destruction of the physical body with gory glee. But well before this, the same fear of things happening to our bodies ran through supernatural tales: of invasion; of contagion; of transformation; and of mutilation.