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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Diagnosing The Will To Suffer: Lovesickness In The Medical And Literary Traditions, Jane Shmidt
Diagnosing The Will To Suffer: Lovesickness In The Medical And Literary Traditions, Jane Shmidt
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Throughout Western medical history, unconsummated, unreturned, or otherwise failed love was believed to generate a disorder of the mind and body that manifested in physiological and psychological symptoms. This study traces the medical and literary history of lovesickness from antiquity through the 19th century, emphasizing significant moments in the development of the medical discourse on love. The project is part of the recent academic focus on the intersection between the humanities and the medical sciences, and it situates literary texts in concurrent medical and philosophical debates on afflictions of the psyche. By contextualizing the fictional works within the scientific …
A Reader's Beheading: Nabokov's Invitation And Authorial Utopia, Aaron Botwick
A Reader's Beheading: Nabokov's Invitation And Authorial Utopia, Aaron Botwick
Publications and Research
“A Reader’s Beheading: Nabokov’s Invitation and Authorial Utopia” argues that Invitation to a Beheading polemically outlines Nabokov’s position on the relationship between reader and writer: in other words, that writing and reading are difficult, elite pursuits whose meanings should necessarily be available only to those willing to face and surmount the magician’s challenges. Narratively, it operates as a kind of roman à clef in which Cincinnatus C. follows a trajectory towards artistic freedom (or authorial utopia) where he is liberated from the constraints of poor readers—among them literalists and Freudians—while Nabokov, ever the unaccommodating creator, frustrates that progression with the …