On March 24, from 12 – 2 pm in Allen 314, Duke’s Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory (CISSCT) is sponsoring a symposium with Kevis Goodman (English, UC-Berkeley) on her forthcoming book Pathologies of Motion: Historical Thinking in Medicine, Aesthetics, and Poetics (Yale University Press, Fall 2022). A description of Professor Goodman’s book appears below.
Participants in the symposium are asked to register, and to read two chapters from Professor Goodman’s book in advance of the discussion. To register and receive copies of these chapters, please email Quantá Holden at quanta.holden@duke.edu or click this link. Please address questions about this event to Elizabeth Apple at elizabeth.apple@duke.edu.
Kevis Goodman’s Pathologies of Motion: Historical Thinking in Medicine, Aesthetics, and Poetics (Yale University Press, Fall 2022) studies the development of medicine, aesthetics, and poetics as overlapping forms of knowledge concerned about the increasingly vexed relationships between historical mobility and the physiological, nervous “motions” within bodies and minds compelled to move. Departing from standard narratives about medicine and art’s shared therapeutic and harmonizing ideals, this book explores Enlightenment and Romantic-era aesthetics and poetics in relation to a central but less well-known area of eighteenth-century environmental medicine: pathology. No mere system of diagnosis or classification, philosophical pathology was an art of interpretation, offering sophisticated ways of reading the multiple conditions and causes of disease, however absent from perception, in their palpable, embodied effects. For medical, anthropological, environmental, and literary authors alike, it helped to locate the dislocations of modern mobility when a full view of its causes and conditions remained imperfectly understood or still unfolding. Kevis Goodman traces the surprising afterlife of the period’s exemplary but unexplained pathology of motion, medical nostalgia, within aesthetic theory and poetics, arguing that nostalgia persisted there not as a named category but as a set of formal principles and practices, perturbing claims about harmony, freedom, and free play of the mind. Pathologies of Motion thereby identifies a counterplot within past and present accounts of aesthetic experience: an undertow, or felt unease, emerging in particular in readers and acts of reading. Ultimately, this study hopes to suggest new ways of understanding later-eighteenth century aesthetics and poetics as intrinsically historical thinking, not only historical by reference to context.