Konferenz

SNF-Project Medical Spaces in Literary Prose of the Long 20th Century

https://projects.unifr.ch/medikale-raeume/?lang=en

Chair of Medical Humanities, Fribourg University

Abstract

The ‘spatial turn’, a term first coined by Edward Soja in reference to Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault, has been enjoying a heyday in recent years. Crucially, it has attracted theoretical contributions from a variety of disciplines, laying the groundwork for a new conception of space; no longer a fixed, passive container for occurrences, people, objects, and their relationships, we can instead conceptualize it as a dynamic category that shapes, determines or changes these phenomena while itself being produced and continuously remodeled by groups of actors, power relations, institutions, cultural practices. From the starting point of human geographers’ and urban planners’ new interest in space, other disciplines have staked a claim in this recent turn – sociology, history, anthropology, literature and media theory, to name a few. The concept of a spatial turn has itself brought about further filiations, such as the ‘topographical turn’ (Weigel 2002). Considering this explosion of spatiality in a variety of disciplines, one particularly puzzling absence makes itself felt: this is the medical space, or, to be precise, the multiplicity of medical spaces that have emerged over time. Medical space broadly speaking has shaped society and culture like hardly any other, is diversified like hardly any other and is, above all, exemplary for all those issues that concern the theorists of space: power relations, multiple symbolic meanings, historical change, shaping of roles and social practices, representations in literature, art, culture etc. However, medical space or rather the diversity of healing and medical spaces has not been examined within the framework of the spatial turn, as some representative volumes indicate (Pickles 2004; Talley jr. 2014; Warf/Arias 2009; Döring/Thielmann 2008; Hallet/Neumann 2009). We intend to fill this research gap with our international and multidisciplinary conference, dedicated to the multiplicity of medical spaces: from the medieval lazaretto to the war hospital, the psychiatric asylum and the sanatorium of the long 19th century; from x-ray rooms and pathology institutes in the early 20th century to the university hospital of the present; from early-modern ‘epidemic’ urban spaces to modern public health facilities. We are interested in the historical emergence and socio-political determinators of such spaces, their actors, objects, boundaries, thresholds and significance; inversely, how they shape social structures, codes and roles; and last but not least,their representations in media, literature and art. Our conference is also particularly concerned with the relationship between the urban space and the modern hospital.

References

• Döring, Jörg/Thielmann, Tristan (eds.): Spatial Turn. Das Raumparadigma in den Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften, Bielefeld 2008

• Foucault, Michel: „Of Other Spaces“. Diacritics. 16/1 (spring 1986). Trans. Jay Miskowiec: p. 22– 27

• Hallet, Wolfgang/Neumann, Birgit (eds.): Raum und Bewegung in der Literatur. Die Literaturwissenschaften und der Spatial Turn, Bielefeld 2009

• Lefebvre, Henri: La production de l’espace. Edition Anthropos 1974

• Löw, Martina: The Sociology of Space – Materiality, Social Structures and Action. Cultural Sociology, New York 2016

• Pickles, John: A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping, and the Geo-coded World, London/New York 2004

• Soja, Edward Willian: Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, London 1989

• Tally Jr., Robert (ed.): Literary cartographies: Spatiality, Representation, and Narrative, New York 2014

• Warf, Barney/Arias, Santa (eds.): The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary perspectives, New York 2009

• Weigel, Sigrid: Zum „topographical turn.“ Kartographie, Topographie und Raumkonzepte in den Kulturwissenschaften. In: KulturPoetik. Bd. 2, Heft 2, 2002, p. 151–16