Category: Articles

Categories
Articles

Stress and Resilience: A Psychologist’s Perspective

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.

Continue reading “Stress and Resilience: A Psychologist’s Perspective”
Categories
Articles

Pathological Memories: Reading Degeneration and Death in ‘Cuervo’ (1892)

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.

Continue reading “Pathological Memories: Reading Degeneration and Death in ‘Cuervo’ (1892)”
Categories
Articles

Anatomy of a Gaze: Body-Reading as Perversion in Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus

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.

Continue reading “Anatomy of a Gaze: Body-Reading as Perversion in Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus”
Categories
Articles

Sick Tales: Body Horror in the Ghost Story

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.

Continue reading “Sick Tales: Body Horror in the Ghost Story”
Categories
Articles

Reading Illness in fin-de-siglo Spain: Baroja’s Madrid Novels

Welcome to the AHRC-funded project on ‘Reading Bodies: Narrating Illness in Spanish and European Literatures and Cultures (1870s to 1960s)’ at the University of Exeter. As the Principal Investigator, my interest in this area of research has developed over several years, starting with representations of pathology in the works of turn-of-the-century Spanish author Pío Baroja. He studied medicine in Madrid and Valencia, submitting a doctoral thesis on ‘Pain. A Psychophysical Study’ in 1893, and practised for a short time as a doctor in the Basque town of Cestona before turning definitively to writing. His disillusionment with studying medicine is reflected in a famous semi-autobiographical novel, El árbol de la ciencia (1911) [The Tree of Knowledge].

Continue reading “Reading Illness in fin-de-siglo Spain: Baroja’s Madrid Novels”