We are seeking essays for the collection *Neurology and Modernity*. While
psychoanalysis has been one of the most dominating discourses within accounts
of modernity, offering explanations of the modern as a fundamentally nervous
state, what has been less examined is the influence of its parent discipline,
neurology. Continuing its own account of nerve force and brain function
alongside the psychoanalytic notion of the unconscious, neurology was largely
simultaneous with what we refer to as modernity.

Essays should engage broadly with the following sorts of questions: To what
extent can the philosophical and cultural discourse of modernity be related to
the emergence and development of the medical discourse of neurology? What
truths inaugurated by neurology were fundamental to the Western self-
perception as modern? What peculiarities of medical discourse reveal the
predisposition towards perceiving history as schismic? What modern states,
modern technologies and modern practices originated the concept of nerve
force? To what extent are technological discourses of the period subtended by
a neurological reframing of the perceiving body? What is the place of the
concept of the body moved by brain function in the various widespread
definitions of modernity? How have nerves and brain function been classed,
sexed, gendered and raced?

Possible Topics:
Academic orthodoxies
Fashionable diseases
Speed and time
Projecting western mindscapes
Neurology and psychophysics
Neurology and popular culture
Literature and the mind/brain
Body of brain science
Visual culture
Nervous disorder as order
Cinematic neurologies
The evolved brain
Neurology, brain injury and war
Aphasia and modernist language
Brain surgery and subjectivity
Reflex arcs
Neurologist as modern artist
Freud and neurology
 

Deadline
Please send a 300-word abstract and 1-page CV to both editors by 1 June 2006.

Editors
Andrew Shail, University of Oxford (andrew.shail_at_st-annes.ox.ac.uk)
Laura Salisbury, Birkbeck College (l.salisbury_at_bbk.ac.uk)

--Andrew Shail, News International Research Fellow in Film, St Anne's CollegeMail: English Faculty, St Cross Building, University of OxfordManor Road, Oxford, OX1 3UQ01865 281147 ========================================================== From the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List CFP_at_english.upenn.edu Full Information at http://cfp.english.upenn.edu or write Jennifer Higginbotham: higginbj_at_english.upenn.edu ==========================================================Received on Sat Mar 18 2006 - 13:37:56 EST