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Full-Text Articles in European Languages and Societies
Saturnine Constellations: Melancholy In Literary History And In The Works Of Baudelaire And Benjamin, Kevin Godbout
Saturnine Constellations: Melancholy In Literary History And In The Works Of Baudelaire And Benjamin, Kevin Godbout
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
Aristotle famously asked the question: why are extraordinary people so often melancholics? “Problem XXX,” written by Aristotle or one of his disciples, speculates that black bile, the humour once believed to cause melancholy, can promote a form of genius, a profound intellectual power. Walter Benjamin and Charles Baudelaire are two writers for whom this theory was true: though they suffered from gloominess and despondency, they also recognized that in the interior of sadness, and even madness, is a kernel of aesthetic, artistic, and philosophical truth. Melencolia illa heroica – whose theory was authoritatively formulated by Ficino, taking after Aristotle’s Problems …
Scintillating Scotoma: Migraine, Aura, And Perception In European Literature, 1860-1900, Janice Y. Zehentbauer
Scintillating Scotoma: Migraine, Aura, And Perception In European Literature, 1860-1900, Janice Y. Zehentbauer
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
This dissertation focuses upon the ways in which nineteenth-century physicians in the emergent field of neurology conceptualized and catalogued the neurological condition, migraine, and the ways in which European literary texts reimagined and interrogated such medical classifications. A recognized condition for hundreds of years, migraine in the nineteenth century became pathological; migraineurs became a “nervous” modern figure that haunted medicine and literary fiction. Anxieties regarding the construction of fragmented vision, bodies, gender, and consciousness render the migraine figure a relevant symbol for the modern era. The nineteenth-century medical treatises by Jean-Martin Charcot, Edward Liveing, and Hubert Airy reveal that a …