Aesthetics of the Clinic

This one-day symposium draws together scholars working at the intersection of literature, aesthetics and mental health to prompt a discussion on the relationship between psychiatric institutions and the production of literature. We ask: how does the space of the psychiatric clinic and innovations in psychiatry generate new literary and aesthetic production and how does that production respond to, reproduce or contest psychiatric space, subjectivity and narrative in the twentieth century? We will think about how psychiatric, literary, artistic and filmic narratives are produced within the clinic and how the transformation of the space of the clinic is coincident with the production of new aesthetics forms. We are particularly interested in the relationship between the deinstitutionalisation of the clinic and the emergence of new narratives of madness, breakdown, freedom and collectivity. 

This symposium will be held at the University of Cambridge on the 11 June 2025. Please email short abstracts to Jess Cotton (jc2384@cam.ac.uk) and Christian Gelder (christian.gelder@mq.edu.au) by April 1.