This panel investigates how modern literature, including literary theory, assimilates, appropriates, (mis)shapes, aestheticizes, glorifies, mocks, or challenges 19th century medical discourses (neurology, psychology, psychiatry, phrenology, psychoanalysis). We look for papers that engage medical texts and narrative, addressing medical literariness. Possible topics: Corpses, necrophilia, autopsy, nosological writings; sexualization/romanticization of doctor-patient relationship; Doctors and Madmen; doctors as patients; writing and artistic production as “cures”; clinic/hospital/asylum as spaces for artistic expression/literary production; supernatural and/or occult (specters, séances, mindreading, hypnosis); pseudosciences; “bad” medicine; the dreamwork: automatic writing, sleep and creativity, somnambulism.

Email 1 page proposals and short CV to: mblock@princeton.edu, mmimran@princeton.edu by September 15, 2008