Pathologies of Motion

This book offers a new account of later eighteenth century medicine, aesthetics, and poetics as overlapping forms of knowledge increasingly worried about the relationship between the geographical mobility of persons displaced from home and the internal motions constituting the physiology and sensibility of their moving bodies. Looking beyond narratives about medicine’s and art’s shared therapeutic or harmonizing function, the book explores the development of aesthetics and poetics in relation to a different—once-central but since underexplored—area eighteenth century environmental medicine: pathology. Pathology (“medical semiotics”) was not diagnosis nor classification but rather an art of reading, offering sophisticated ways of apprehending the multiple conditions and causes (the converging internal, external, remote, proximate, and other forces) present and discernible in and as their embodied effects, not hidden or separate from them. How might literary studies’ understanding of aesthetics and poetics change when these are considered not in terms of medicine’s attempts to accommodate bodies and minds to their historical or natural environments, but in terms of pathology’s grasp of the dislocations opening up between them? This study argues that Enlightenment medicine’s confrontations with the troubled aspects of mobility were continued and developed within later eighteenth-century aesthetic theory and some of the poetics forged at the turn of the next century, including theories of reading. This approach can offer a way of attending to the distinctive historiography carried out within aesthetics and poetics not by reference to external context but by understanding their own intrinsic historical thinking.