Pathologies of Motion
Historical Thinking in Medicine, Aesthetics, and Poetics
Published on 28. March 2023
Book
Hardback
320 pages
978-0-300-24396-3 (ISBN)
Description
An original study of late Enlightenment aesthetics, poetics, and environmental medicine as overlapping ways of comprehending the dislocations of historical existence lodged in the movements of bodies and minds
This book studies later eighteenth-century medicine, aesthetics, and poetics as overlapping forms of knowledge increasingly concerned about the relationship between the geographical movements of persons displaced from home and the physiological or nervous "motions" within their bodies and minds. Looking beyond familiar 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 their causes and conditions remained imperfectly understood or still unfolding. 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 condition but as a set of formal principles and practices, perturbing claims about the harmony, freedom, and free play of the mind.
This book studies later eighteenth-century medicine, aesthetics, and poetics as overlapping forms of knowledge increasingly concerned about the relationship between the geographical movements of persons displaced from home and the physiological or nervous "motions" within their bodies and minds. Looking beyond familiar 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 their causes and conditions remained imperfectly understood or still unfolding. 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 condition but as a set of formal principles and practices, perturbing claims about the harmony, freedom, and free play of the mind.
Reviews / Votes
"Excellent . . . a tour-de-force."-Arden Hegele, British Association for Romanticism Studies ReviewWinner of the 2022 Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize, sponsored by the International Conference on Romanticism
Shortlisted for the Marilyn Gaull Award from The Wordsworth Circle
Honorable Mention from the Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize, sponsored by The Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts
Shortlisted for the Kenshur Prize, sponsored by The Indiana U Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies
Winner of the 2025 Robert Lowry Patten Award, sponsored by Rice University
"In tracing how eighteenth-century pathology and aesthetics registered causal forces beyond our immediate ken, Kevis Goodman offers an electrifying account of the way poetics made abstract historical processes visible at a pivotal moment in global modernity."-Lynn Festa, author of Fiction Without Humanity
"Goodman provides a new way of thinking about human freedom, the imagination, volition, and mobility. This is a richly erudite and theoretically lucid book that anyone working in this period will want to read and reread."-Alan Bewell, University of Toronto
"By bringing together aesthetics and medicine, Goodman offers a new and enthralling description of modernity. Pathologies of Motion also brilliantly vindicates, as it demonstrates, the practice of symptomatic reading."-Deidre Lynch, Harvard University
"Goodman's elegant, learned work is the entering wedge in a radical rethinking of Romanticism and its predecessors. It reveals a pathological counter-current in tension with the age's dominant aesthetic quest for harmony."-Marjorie Levinson, author of Thinking through Poetry
"Goodman rediscovers eighteenth-century pathology as a synoptic discipline projecting the material body and the imagination as mutually involved and evolving agents of human behavior and consciousness. Her book thereby offers exciting new readings of reading itself-of the physiological functions of organized sound-as well as of Schiller and the Scottish doctors, of the newly privileged phenomenon of nostalgia, and of some of the best-known Romantic poems."-David Simpson, author of Engaging Violence
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
2 b-w illus.
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 156 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-300-24396-3 (9780300243963)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Kevis Goodman is professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to published essays and edited collections, she is the author of Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History.