ACLA 2021 : Literary Diagnosis and the Anti-Medical Humanities

Potential topics could include, but are not limited to:

• Cultural motivations for elevating literary over medical discourse (postcolonial, post-Soviet, and Global South perspectives especially encouraged);
• How this clash reveals the difficulty of "translating" pain, disease, and chronic illness;
• Whether interventions between these discourses give new insight into experience of being ill, mad, or otherwise dis-eased;
• Whether literary tradition and medical narrative are in fact indebted to, or even infected by, one another;
• Approaches that disturb set divisions between the fictional and the "real;"
• Reworkings of this literary-medical clash of authority in post-modern contexts.

Please submit your proposal (max. 350 words) and CV through the ACLA site by October 30th. Questions for the organizer are welcome.