Ends of Knowledge Project Lead Jamie will be speaking at a CRASSH-funded conference at Cambridge University. If you’re in the area, do come along!
The Functions of Criticism.
19 May 2023 - 20 May 2023
CRASSH, Cambridge University, Faculty of English
‘The form of experience and the critical turn: a view from the health humanities.’
For health humanities researchers in the UK, debates about critique crystallised around a ‘critical turn’ in the mid-2010s. Motivated by a concern that prior models of the medical humanities acted only as a ‘helpmeet’ to the biomedical industry, this turn seeks a ‘closer engagement with critical theory, queer and disability studies, activist politics and other allied fields’ as well as a more active entanglement with ‘biomedical cultures’ (Viney, Callard, Woods 2015). Building from recent scholarship by Merve Emre (who traces the ‘exit’ of literary studies from literature departments and into the medical school), this paper considers the working of criticism as it operates in ‘boundary’ spaces (Knights 2015) between healthcare, medicine, and literary humanities. Drawing from data derived from interviews conducted in 2022 with literary scholars involved in large-scale critical medical humanities projects (see Rákóczi and Woods, 2023), I outline: i) how recent collaborative and health-related projects have sought to exemplify this critical turn, ii) what challenges they have encountered in doing so on the ground, and iii) how such encounters are shifting definitions of literary value and form. Then, I argue that there is a particularly productive tension at work between critical approaches to texts and the operationalisation of “lived experience” in medical humanities research. Much is at stake for literary scholars who feel compelled to critically disrupt the ethical economies into which lived experiences are drawn (by social scientists, cognitive philosophers, policymakers, arts and health practitioners, and so on) and the text becomes a key site from which to adjudicate and communicate this unease. Through a reading of how two texts (Buchi Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen and Samuel Beckett’s Company) are treated in medical humanities work, I argue that surprisingly therapeutic understandings of textual form are therefore appearing – and making mischief – at the heart of critical/use imaginaries.
Suggested Reading.
Beckett, Samuel, Company (Grove/Atlantic, Incorporated, 1981).
Emecheta, Buchi, Second-Class Citizen (Heinemann, 1994).
Emre, Merve, Post-Discipline: Literature, Professionalism, and the Crisis of the Humanities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).
Knights, Ben, ‘English on Its Borders’, in English Studies: The State of the Discipline, Past, Present, and Future, ed. by Niall Gildea, Helena Goodwyn, Megan Kitching, and Helen Tyson (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2015).
Viney, William, Felicity Callard, and Angela Woods, ‘Critical Medical Humanities: Embracing Entanglement, Taking Risks’, Medical Humanities, 41.1 (2015).
Woods, Angela, and James Rákóczi, ‘Literature in Collaboration: The Work of Literature in the Critical Medical Humanities’, in Medicine and Literature, ed. by Anna Elsner and Monika Pietrzak-Franger (Cambridge University Press, 2023).