Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction: The Syndrome Syndrome PDF
Preview Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction: The Syndrome Syndrome
Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction This collection addresses the current preoccupation with neurological con- ditions and disorders in contemporary British and American literature. The book places these fi ctional treatments within a broader cultural and his- torical context, exploring such topics as the two cultures debate, the neuro- logical turn, postmodernism and the ‘post-postmodern’, and transatlantic responses to September 11. Considering a variety of materials including mainstream literary fi ction, graphic novels, popular fi ction, autobiographi- cal writing, fi lm, and television, contributors consider the interface between the sciences and humanities. They also develop the debate about ‘post- postmodernism’ as a new humanism or a return to realism and investigate questions of form and genre. The essays in this collection discuss contem- porary writers’ engagements with the relation between the individual and the social, exploring connections between the ‘syndrome syndrome’ (refer- ring to the prevalence in contemporary literature of neurological phenom- ena evident at the biological level) and existing work in the fi eld of trauma studies (where explanations tend to take a psychoanalytical form), going on to question the assumptions that have marked these fi elds. The current preoccupation with neurological conditions presents us with a new and dis- tinctive form of trauma literature, one concerned less with psychoanalysis than with the physical and evolutionary status of human beings. T. J. Lustig is Senior Lecturer in American Literature at Keele University, UK. James Peacock is Senior Lecturer in English and American Literatures at Keele University, UK. Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature 1 Literature After 9/11 8 Trauma and Romance Edited by Ann Keniston in Contemporary British and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn Literature Edited by Jean-Michel Ganteau 2 Reading Chuck Palahniuk and Susana Onega American Monsters and Literary Mayhem 9 Spatial Politics in Contemporary Edited by Cynthia Kuhn London Literature and Lance Rubin Writing Architecture and the Body Laura Colombino 3 Beyond Cyberpunk New Critical Perspectives 10 Diseases and Disorders in Edited by Graham J. Murphy Contemporary Fiction and Sherryl Vint The Syndrome Syndrome Edited by T.J. Lustig 4 Criticism, Crisis, and and James Peacock Contemporary Narrative Textual Horizons in an Age of Global Risk Edited by Paul Crosthwaite 5 Food and Culture in Contemporary American Fiction Lorna Piatti-Farnell 6 Intertextual and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Cormac McCarthy Borders and Crossing Edited by Nicholas Monk with a Foreword by Rick Wallach 7 Global Issues in Contemporary Hispanic Women’s Writing Shaping Gender, the Environment, and Politics Edited by Estrella Cibreiro and Francisca López Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction The Syndrome Syndrome Edited by T.J. Lustig and James Peacock NEW YORK LONDON First published 2013 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2013 Taylor & Francis The right of T. J. Lustig and James Peacock to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Diseases and disorders in contemporary fiction : the syndrome syndrome / edited by T. J. Lustig and James Peacock. pages cm. — (Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature ; 10) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Diseases in literature. 2. Fiction—History and criticism. I. Lustig, T. J., 1961– editor of compilation. II. Peacock, James, 1970– editor of compilation. PN56.D56D57 2013 809'.933561—dc23 2012046124 ISBN13: 978-0-415-50740-0 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-06731-4 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by IBT Global. Printed and bound in the United States of America by IBT Global. SFI-01234 SFI label applies to the text stock Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 T.J. LUSTIG AND JAMES PEACOCK 1 The Naturalistic Turn, the Syndrome, and the Rise of the Neo-Phenomenological Novel 17 PATRICIA WAUGH 2 Mapping the Syndrome Novel 35 STEPHEN J. BURN 3 From Syndrome to Sincerity: Benjamin Kunkel’s Indecision 53 ADAM KELLY 4 “We learned to tell our story walking:” Tourette’s and Urban Space in Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn 67 JAMES PEACOCK 5 The Pathologies of Mobility: Time Travel as Syndrome in The Time Traveller’s Wife, La Jetée and Twelve Monkeys 83 BRIAN BAKER 6 Syndrome, Symptom, and Trauma Chains in American Pre- and Post-9/11 Novels 98 BENT SØRENSEN 7 Mind and Brain: The Representation of Trauma in Martin Amis’ Yellow Dog and Ian McEwan’s Saturday 115 NICK BENTLEY vi Contents 8 “Two-way traffi c”? Syndrome as Symbol in Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker 130 T.J. LUSTIG 9 “I wanted unheimlich [ . . . ] but of the right kind. Strangeness and Strangerness without the blank despair:” Trauma and Travel in the Works of Jenny Diski 144 JOANNA PRICE 10 The Human Condition? 160 MARTYN BRACEWELL 11 A Psychiatrist’s Opinion of the Neuronovel 169 LISETTA LOVETT Annotated Bibliography of Primary Materials 183 NICOLA BRINDLEY Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Materials 189 HANNAH MERRY Glossary 195 List of Contributors 201 Index 205 Acknowledgments The editors gratefully acknowledge the David Bruce Centre for American Studies at Keele University, whose generous fi nancial assistance made pos- sible the one-day conference in October 2009 at which many of the essays in the present collection were fi rst presented as papers. For their encourage- ment and creative suggestions, thanks are also due to the three anonymous reviewers selected by Routledge. This page intentionally left blank Introduction T.J. Lustig and James Peacock An Iowan truck driver is involved in a road accident, wakes up from a coma and is unable to recognize his own sister (The Echo Maker); unable to make up his mind about anything, a young New Yorker is tempted to try a miracle drug called Abulinix (Indecision); an orphan in Brooklyn with Tourette’s syndrome goes undercover to fi nd the killer of his friend and mentor (Motherless Brooklyn); a London neurologist diagnoses Hun- tington’s disease in a man who accosts him in the street during a protest march against the Iraq invasion (Saturday). What connects these brief syn- opses is, of course, a preoccupation with neurological conditions. It is one many other texts share. Rain Man (1988), Enduring Love (1997), Fight Club (1999), The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003), The Time Traveller’s Wife (2003), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), Lowboy (2009), United States of Tara (2009): a cursory list of fi lm, novel and TV series titles indicates the extent to which British and American cultural production of the late twentieth and early twenty-fi rst centuries has been fascinated by neurological conditions including among others: Capgras syndrome, abulia, autism, de Clérambault’s syndrome, dissociative identity disorder (DID) and paranoid schizophrenia. This col- lection addresses many of these, but its overall purpose is not only to iden- tify the ‘syndrome syndrome’ as a phenomenon and to analyse individual instances (though it does both of these). It is to place these fi ctional treat- ments within a broader cultural and historical context. What are the social, cultural or historical determinants of the ‘syndrome syndrome’? What is its signifi cance for writers, cultural commentators and for literary theorists and critics? And how might scientists respond to the heightened presence of scientifi cally-defi ned conditions in literary texts? The ‘two cultures’ controversy of the late 1950s and early 1960s contin- ues to frame current discussions of the encounter between literature and science and also sheds light on the more specifi c fascination with neurologi- cal disorders in contemporary culture. In “The Two Cultures” (1959), C. P. Snow (a research chemist turned novelist and government advisor) famously painted a picture of division, with “literary intellectuals at one pole—at the other scientists” and “between them a gulf of mutual incomprehension”
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