Lausanne ESSE conference, 2024. CFP for a seminar entitled:
32. Literature and Mental Health: Diagnosis, Syndromes and Symptoms [in person]
Despite the field of mental health being currently dominated by biomedical and neurological approaches, literature continues to see individuals as not reducible to their brain. Novels, auto/biographical texts and emerging forms of literature have never stopped refusing the conflation of ‘having’ a condition with an ontological definition: the subject’s symptoms in literary works challenge medical assignation and produce new narratives and imaginary worlds.
The following seminar will welcome papers on the effects of the ‘failure of diagnoses’ (Waugh 2013) in the ‘syndrome novels’ that emerged in the 1980s and have flourished since, as well as in literary texts exploring subjective crises triggered or enhanced by medical diagnoses, in particular diagnoses of mental health. The seminar welcomes contributions addressing new developments within health humanities, encouraging questions about the literary representations of care, wellbeing and a better understanding of the implications of the therapeutic process in the way individuals make sense of the symptoms that they complain about, the syndrome they are said to suffer from and the diagnosis that turns them into patients.
Contributions about illnesses outside the field of mental health are also welcome.
Convenors:
• Patricia Waugh (Durham University, UK)
p.n.waugh@durham.ac.uk nicolas.boileau@univ-amu.fr
• Nicolas P. Boileau (Aix-Marseille University, France)
nicolas.boileau@univ-amu.fr
The forthcoming ESSE conference will be held in Lausanne, Switzerland (August 26-30, 2024). All the information about the event can be found here: https://lnkd.in/d4AhNzxQ
SEMINAR PAPERS
Scholars wishing to present their paper in one of the seminars are invited to submit 250-word abstracts of their proposed presentations and a brief bio directly to the convenors of the respective seminars by 31 January 2024.
