Reading Breath in Literature

141 Pages·2019·1.336 MB·English

by  Arthur Rose, Stefanie Heine, Naya Tsentourou, Corinne Saunders, Peter Garratt

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LITERATURE,
SCIENCE AND MEDICINE
Series Editors: Sharon Ruston, Alice Jenkins
and Catherine Belling
Artthhuurr Rose
SSttefaniie HHeeiinne
Nayaa TTssennttoourouu
Coriinnnnee SSaauunnddeerrss
PPeetter GGarrrraatt
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
Series Editors
Sharon Ruston
Department of English and Creative Writing
Lancaster University
Lancaster, UK
Alice Jenkins
School of Critical Studies
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, UK
Catherine Belling
Feinberg School of Medicine
Northwestern University
Chicago, IL, USA
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Kate Hayles, Professor of English, Duke University, USA
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Sally Shuttleworth, Professorial Fellow in English, St Anne’s College,
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Arthur Rose · Stefanie Heine
Naya Tsentourou · Corinne Saunders
Peter Garratt
Reading Breath
in Literature
Arthur Rose Corinne Saunders
Institute for Medical Humanities Department of English Studies
Durham University Durham University
Durham, UK Durham, UK
Stefanie Heine Peter Garratt
Centre for Comparative Literature Department of English Studies
University of Toronto Durham University
Toronto, ON, Canada Durham, UK
Naya Tsentourou
Department of English
University of Exeter
Cornwall, UK
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
ISBN 978-3-319-99947-0 ISBN 978-3-319-99948-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99948-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018957436
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2019. This book is an open access publication.
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A
cknowledgements
This book originally emerged as a panel discussion organised by Naya
Tsentourou for the 2016 Annual Conference of the British Society
of Literature and Science at the University of Birmingham. The
authors would like to thank Ben Doyle and Milly Davies at Palgrave
for all their support and patience as this project developed. Rose and
Saunders were supported by the Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator
Award Life of Breath (103339/Z/13/Z). Saunders and Garratt were
supported by the Wellcome Trust Collaborative Award Hearing the
Voice (108720/Z/13/Z). Heine was supported by a Swiss National
Foundation (SNF) Postdoc.Mobility Fellowship. The contributors thank
the Wellcome Trust for supporting the publication of this work as an
Open Access volume.
v
c
ontents
1 Introduction: Reading Breath in Literature 1
Arthur Rose
2 The Play of Breath: Chaucer’s Narratives of Feeling 17
Corinne Saunders
3 Wasting Breath in Hamlet 39
Naya Tsentourou
4 Out of Breath: Respiratory Aesthetics from Ruskin
to Vernon Lee 65
Peter Garratt
5 Ebb and Flow: Breath-Writing from Ancient Rhetoric
to Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg 91
Stefanie Heine
6 Combat Breathing in Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last
Sigh 113
Arthur Rose
vii
A c
uthors And ontributors
Peter Garratt is Associate Professor in the Department of English
Studies at Durham University. His publications include Victorian
Empiricism (2010) and The Cognitive Humanities: Embodied Mind in
Literature and Culture (2016). A forthcoming volume, Distributed
Cognition from Victorian Culture to Modernism, co-edited with Miranda
Anderson and Mark Sprevak, will be published in late 2018.
Stefanie Heine is a Postdoctoral Fellow (SNF Postdoc.Mobility) at the
Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, Canada.
She is the author of Visible Words and Chromatic Pulse. Virginia Woolf’s
Writing, Impressionist Painting, Maurice Blanchot’s Image (2014).
Arthur Rose is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in English Studies and
Medical Humanities at Durham University, UK. He is author of Literary
Cynics: Borges, Beckett, Coetzee (2017) and co-edited, with Michael
J. Kelly, Theories of History: History Read across the Humanities (2018).
Corinne Saunders is Professor of Medieval Literature and Co-Director
of the Institute of Medical Humanities, Durham University. Her publica-
tions include Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance
(2010) and (co-edited with Carolyne Larrington and Frank Brandsma)
Emotions in Medieval Arthurian Literature: Body, Mind, Voice (2015).
ix
x AUTHORS AND CONTRIBUTORS
Naya Tsentourou is Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at the
University of Exeter, Penryn. She is the author of Milton and the Early
Modern Culture of Devotion: Bodies at Prayer (2017) and has co-edited,
with Lucia Nigri, Forms of Hypocrisy in Early Modern England (2017).
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Reading Breath in Literature
Arthur Rose
Abstract 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.
Keywords Breath · Medical humanities · Markedness ·
Embodied poetics · Literature
Breath is an autonomic function that is essential for life. Luce Irigaray
writes, in “The Age of Breath,” “breathing, in fact, corresponds to the
first autonomous gesture of a human being.”1 In a less anthropocentric,
more physiological sense, breath, as a term, catches and brings together
all those processes by which beings with lungs take in and release air:
the mechanical, the chemical, the affective and the metaphoric. The dia-
phragm contracts. It drops. A vacuum appears in the chest cavity, which
allows the lungs to expand with air. While the lungs are surfeit with air,
oxygen passes through thin membranes in the alveoli to bond with hae-
moglobin, which, in turn, releases its load of carbon dioxide. The expe-
rience can be ecstatic, as for Keri Hulme in this description of breathing
© The Author(s) 2019 1
A. Rose et al., Reading Breath in Literature,
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99948-7_1