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Título de Acceso Abierto
Reading Breath in Literature
Arthur Rose Stefanie Heine Naya Tsentourou Corinne Saunders Peter Garratt
Resumen/Descripción – provisto por la editorial
No disponible.
Palabras clave – provistas por la editorial
Fiction; Drama; Poetry and Poetics; Literary Theory
Disponibilidad
Institución detectada | Año de publicación | Navegá | Descargá | Solicitá |
---|---|---|---|---|
No requiere | 2019 | SpringerLink |
Información
Tipo de recurso:
libros
ISBN impreso
978-3-319-99947-0
ISBN electrónico
978-3-319-99948-7
Editor responsable
Springer Nature
País de edición
Reino Unido
Fecha de publicación
2019
Información sobre derechos de publicación
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
Cobertura temática
Tabla de contenidos
Introduction: Reading Breath in Literature
Arthur Rose
This chapter presents current debates around breathing and breathlessness in the medical humanities and frames this collection of essays as a series of interventions that attend to literature’s role in such debates. Specifically, these essays consider what literature might offer to discussions of breath as a phenomenon that blends physiology with culturally rich metaphors.
Pp. 1-16
The Play of Breath: Chaucer’s Narratives of Feeling
Corinne Saunders
This essay explores the treatment of breath and breathlessness in the imaginative fiction of Geoffrey Chaucer. Chaucer draws on medieval medical theories, rooted in classical thought, to portray the ways that motions of the vital spirit—closely connected with breath—create powerful physical responses, which at their most extreme cause sighs and swoons. According to this pre-Cartesian world view, mind, body and affect are intimately connected. The movement of breath plays a key role in Chaucer’s depiction of the experiences of emotion, particularly love and grief, and in his treatment of gender. This physiological emphasis creates narratives of feeling that are deeply embodied. The essay focuses on Chaucer’s romance writing, in particular, , and .
Pp. 17-38
Wasting Breath in
Naya Tsentourou
This chapter draws on instances of disordered breathing in in order to examine the cultural significance of sighs in the early modern period, as well as in the context of current work in the field of medical humanities. Tracing the medical history of sighing in ancient and early modern treatises of the passions, the chapter argues that sighs, in the text and the performance of the tragedy, exceed their conventional interpretation as symptoms of pain and disrupt meaning on the page and on stage. In the light of New Materialist theory, the air circulating in is shown to dismantle narratives of representation, posing new questions for the future of medical humanities.
Pp. 39-63
Out of Breath: Respiratory Aesthetics from Ruskin to Vernon Lee
Peter Garratt
This chapter examines the roles played by respiration—as physiological process, and embodied response—in the development of aesthetic theories at the end of the nineteenth century, traced from Ruskin to Vernon Lee. Late nineteenth-century attempts to define aesthetic experience in terms of its attendant physiological reactions still drew on breath’s immaterial poetic associations (air, wind and spirit) while being alert to the way respiratory control shifts easily between voluntary and involuntary modes of experience (will/automation). Lee’s idea of aesthetic experience envisages a complex, perhaps mystifying, action of involvement with works of art, dependent upon physiological, sensorimotor and respiratory movement. Exploring her understanding of empathetic identification, and relating it to current models of enactive cognition, the chapter recovers an entangled art and science of breath in nineteenth-century aesthetic theory.
Pp. 65-89
Ebb and Flow: Breath-Writing from Ancient Rhetoric to Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg
Stefanie Heine
Following the path of Charles Olson, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg negotiate breath as a compositional principle for a new particularly American literature. Such a poetics of breathing turns out to be a revival of classical thought. For ancient rhetoricians, especially Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian, the breath-pause is constitutive for structuring speech. Already in the ancient approaches, a dilemma emerges: breathing is supposed to cut speech into well-measured units while physical respiration tends to be irregular. Even though the Beat poets seem to elude this problem in their attempt to adapt composition to the writer’s individual rhythms, breath, as they theorise it, is a point where bodily processes and cultural techniques intersect. The natural, organic body as Kerouac and Ginsberg celebrate it invokes a cultural memory, and thus, the idea of a purely embodied writing is upset.
Pp. 91-112
Combat Breathing in Salman Rushdie’s
Arthur Rose
This chapter considers how thinking about the postcolony often invokes a language of breathlessness. Moments of severe breathlessness in postcolonial literature and criticism give way to observations of more systemic distortions in breathing patterns. By tracing the breathing metaphors in Salman Rushdie’s , the chapter offers a literary rapprochement to these different understandings of postcolonial breathlessness, particularly in the work of Frantz Fanon. It demonstrates the importance of the breath metaphor for postcolonial literature. Reciprocally, such literature shows how the cultural baggage of these breath metaphors leads to forms of catachresis and markedness. The language of breath and breathlessness often conflates their overlapping meanings in health, hygiene and literature. This chapter shows how Rushdie’s work helps to signal these overlapping significances.
Pp. 113-134