Project

The project explores forms and functions of medical spaces in literary prose from the early twentieth century to the present, contributing to our understanding of the role of literature in the ongoing process of medicalization.

Modern medical spaces

The rapid evolution of scientific medicine during the 20th and 21st centuries has brought about numerous new technologies – as well as novel, highly functionalized interior spaces, types of buildings, and architectural topographies. 20th- and later these were followed by intensive care wards, multidisciplinary hospitals, and clinics or centers for radiotherapy. These medical spaces are structured by multiple (visible or non-visible) boundaries and furnished with technical instruments and with experts which produce new knowledge and new practices; ranging from the detection of germs and the first chest X-ray to successful organ transplants.In these “spaces of progress”, man is now measured, quantified, and enhanced in novel ways, processes which consequently produce novel and divergent public reactions. Doctors utilize these same spaces for their self-fashioning and the celebration of scientific medicine: the spaces are portrayed – e.g. in inaugurational speeches, medical journals, and popular scientific literature – as guarantors of cultural stability, scientific advancement, and even technical omnipotence. All this is especially true in times of crisis.

Bacteriological Laboratory Royal Prussian Institute for Infectious Diseases around 1910 (RKI)

PET CT Scan room Charité

Medical spaces in literature

Literature offers the contrasting perspective, especially fictional prose. Here, medical spaces are displayed as disturbing and unstable settings of existential human experience rather than as spaces of robust knowledge or scientific progress. While doctors in the 20th and 21st centuries conceive their surgical theatres, microbiological laboratories, and radiation centers as unambiguous and epistemologically reliable, literature both discovers and brings about their symbolic polyvalence. 20th- and theatres and radiation rooms are therein viewed as transitional zones between life and death, individuality and conformity, humanity and technicism rather than as sites of cultural stability and continuity. This project’s aim is consequently to reconstruct the symbolic polyvalence of medical spaces in literary prose, spanning from Ernst Weiß and Leonhard Frank to Christa Wolf and David Wagner.

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Operation theatre Berne Inselspital 1927

Sanatorium Grafenhof

Our thesis is that medical settings, due to their significance, closure, and mysterious character, serve an important cultural function in giving material form to the manifold – political, social, artistic – crises of the long 20th century.

Time periods: interwar (1918-1933) and the ‘long’ present (1945-present)

The project focuses on two periods which all see remarkable medical innovation, the emergence of new narrative forms, and a profound change of political and social order: the interwar period and the present, which we conceive of as running from the postwar period to the postmodern era. From a medical humanities perspective, we aim to explore the role of literature in the ongoing process of medicalization that we think singularly characterizes the long 20th century. In addition, and from the somewhat reversed perspective of literary scholarship, we ask how the spatial innovations of scientific medicine affect creative prose, e.g. narrative form and genre experiments, how they give rise to new text types and media formats, such as the ‘illness narratives’ currently flooding the book market. Taking its cues from the emerging narratology of space, our project thus aims to contribute to both cultural history and literary spatial studies.
Our hypothesis is that literature not only plays an important role in the process of medicalization, but participates specifically with an autonomous voice in the shaping and framing of medical spaces. This serves as the basis for our two subprojects, one of which is dedicated to the interwar period, the other to the ‘long’ present.

Project I: “A homely smell of all kinds of chemicals”: medical expert spaces in literary prose 1918-1933

Martina King (PI) explores the semantics of medical spaces in the heterogeneous prose of the interwar period. How are the emerging expert spaces narratively represented and functionalized to reflect multiple contemporary aspects of crisis – political extremism and mass culture, precarity, social tensions and changing gender roles, and, most important, the janus face of technology cult and technology horror? These questions are dealt with in the following texts:

Leonhard Frank: Die Kriegskrüppel (1918), Ernst Weiß: Mensch gegen Mensch (1919), Ders.: Der Arzt (1919), Thomas Mann: Der Zauberberg (1924), Arthur Schnitzler: Traumnovelle (1925), Paula Schlier: Petras Aufzeichnungen oder Konzept einer Jugend nach dem Diktat der Zeit (1926), Franz Werfel: Die Entfremdung (1927), Erich Maria Remarque: Im Westen nichts Neues (1928), Ernst Weiß: Georg Letham, Arzt und Mörder (1931), Ders.: Die Herznaht (1937)

Project II: The hospital narratives: clinical spaces in German and English pathographies 1945-present

Mona Baie (doctoral student) explores the semantics of hospital spaces in late 20th- and 21st-century autobiographical prose. How are the high-tech clinical settings of the international ‘illness narratives’ narratively represented? How do they contribute to critical reflection on the issues of medicalization, such as embodiment and identity, suffering, gender roles, technicity? These questions are considered in the following German- and English-language texts:

Denton Welch: A Voice Through a Cloud (1950), Thomas Bernhard: Der Atem (1978), Audre Lorde: The Cancer Journals (1980), Christa Wolf: Leibhaftig (2002), Hilary Mantel: Giving Up The Ghost (2003), David Wagner: Leben (2013)