Entangled Bodies Art Identity And Intercorporeality

Organ transplantation is a medical innovation that has offered the potential to enhance and save lives since the first successful procedure in the 1950s. Subsequent developments in scientific knowledge and advances in surgical techniques have allowed for more efficient and refined procurement, minimal surgical complications, and increased success rate. However, procedures such as organ transplantation raise questions about the nature of our relationship with our own bodies; about our embodiment and personal and corporeal identity. This book is comprised of academic essays, personal reflections, and creative writing from researchers and artists involved in an ongoing collaborative art-science project about the experience and culture of heart transplantation. The writings and reflections included discuss embodiment, what it means to inhabit a body and define oneself in relation to it, including struggles with identity formation; set in both clinical and private spaces. The uniqueness of this volume consists in the authors’ aim of connecting the specific experience of heart transplantation to the more widely shared experience of relating to the world and one another through the body’s physical, perceived, and imagined boundaries. Such boundaries and the commonly held beliefs in personal autonomy that are associated with them are a subject of ongoing philosophical and scientific debate. What’s more, the resources of art and culture, including popular culture, literature, historical and contemporary art, are extremely useful in revising our views of what it means for the body’s boundaries to be philosophically ‘leaky.’ Following the discussion initiated by contributor Margrit Shildrick, this book contributes to the field of inquiry of the phenomenon of embodiment and inter-corporeality, the growing body of literature emerging from collaborative art-science research projects, and the wider area of disability studies. This book will be of particular interest to those with personal, scholarly, and creative interests in the experience of transplantation, or illness in general.

Organ transplantation is a medical innovation that has offered the potential to enhance and save lives since the first successful procedure in the 1950s. Subsequent developments in scientific knowledge and advances in surgical techniques have allowed for more efficient and refined procurement, minimal surgical complications, and increased success rate. However, procedures such as organ transplantation raise questions about the nature of our relationship with our own bodies; about our embodiment and personal and corporeal identity. This book is comprised of academic essays, personal reflections, and creative writing from researchers and artists involved in an ongoing collaborative art-science project about the experience and culture of heart transplantation. The writings and reflections included discuss embodiment, what it means to inhabit a body and define oneself in relation to it, including struggles with identity formation; set in both clinical and private spaces. The uniqueness of this volume consists in the authors' aim of connecting the specific experience of heart transplantation to the more widely shared experience of relating to the world and one another through the body's physical, perceived, and imagined boundaries. Such boundaries and the commonly held beliefs in personal autonomy that are associated with them are a subject of ongoing philosophical and scientific debate. What's more, the resources of art and culture, including popular culture, literature, historical and contemporary art, are extremely useful in revising our views of what it means for the body's boundaries to be philosophically 'leaky.' Following the discussion initiated by contributor Margrit Shildrick, this book contributes to the field of inquiry of the phenomenon of embodiment and inter-corporeality, the growing body of literature emerging from collaborative art-science research projects, and the wider area of disability studies. This book will be of particular interest to those with personal, scholarly, and creative interests in the experience of transplantation, or illness in general.

This intersectional collection considers how literature, film, and narrative, more broadly, take up the complexities of health, demonstrating the pivotal role of storytelling in health politics.

Drawing on relevant discussions of embodiment in phenomenology, feminist theory, psychoanalytic theory, queer theory and post-colonial theory, Body Images explores the role played by the body image in our everyday existence.

This book draws inspiration from Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concept of intercorporeality to offer a new, multidisciplinary perspective on the body. By drawing attention to the body's ability to simultaneously sense and be sensed, Merleau-Ponty transcends the object-subject divide and describes how bodies are about, into, and within other bodies. Such inherent relationality constitutes the essence of intercorporeality, and the chapters in this book examine such relationality from a host of diverse perspectives. The book begins with an introductory chapter in which the editors review the current research on bodily interaction, and introduce the notion of intercorporeality as a potentially integrative framework. The first section then offers four chapters devoted to clarifying theoretical and developmental perspectives on intercorporeality. Section 2 contains three chapters that provide insight on intercorporeality from evolutionary, historical, and cross-sectional perspectives. In Section 3, four chapters examine the intercorporeal nature of meaning-making during human interaction. Section 4 then presents three chapters that explore the intercorporeal nature of multi-agent interactions and the role that non-animate bodies (i.e., objects) play in such interaction. Throughout all the chapters, the authors work to integrate research in their specific discipline into the larger, transdisciplinary notion of intercorporeality. This collection provides an indisputably unique perspective on bodies-in-interaction, while simultaneously offering an interdisciplinary way forward in contemporary scholarship on bodies, meaning, and interaction.

Focusing on the various intersections between illness and literature across time and space, The Portrait of an Artist as a Pathographer seeks to understand how ontological, phenomenological and epistemological experiences of illness have been dealt with and represented in literary writings and literary studies. In this volume, scholars from across the world have come together to understand how the pathological condition of being ill (the sufferers), as well as the pathologists dealing with the ill (the healers and caregivers), have shaped literary works. The language of medical science, with its jargon, and the language of the every day, with its emphasis on utility, prove equally insufficient and futile in capturing the pain and suffering of illness. It is this insufficiency and futility that makes us turn towards the canonical works of Joseph Conrad, Samuel Beckett, William Carlos Williams, Virginia Woolf, Kazuo Ishiguro, Miroslav Holub as well as the non-canonical António Lobo Antunes, Yumemakura Baku, Wopko Jensma and Vaslav Nijinsky. This volume helps in understanding and capturing the metalanguage of illness while presenting us with the tradition of ‘writing pain’. In an effort to expand the definition of pathography to include those who are on the other side of pain, the essays in this collection aim to portray the above-mentioned pathographers as artists, turning the anxiety and suffering of illness into an art form. Looking deeply into such creative aspects of illness, this book also seeks to evoke the possibility of pathography as world literature. This book will be of particular interest to undergraduate, postgraduate and research students, as well as scholars of literature and medical humanities who are interested in the intersections between literary studies and medical science.

As an epistemological perspective, ‘nomadism’ is an emerging field of scholarship, offering intersectionality with eco-criticism, feminism, post-colonialism, migration studies, and translation. Much of the scholarship that uses the precepts of nomadism to read cultural texts and phenomena is scattered as separate articles in academic journals or as single chapters in books wherein the primary focus is the intersectional fields. Few book-length publications solely focus on the ramifications of nomadism; Posthumanist Nomadisms across non-Oedipal Spatiality fills that void. The fifteen chapters in this volume explore the possibilities offered by the nomadic perspective to explore a wide range of literary and cultural texts; organized into three sections, “Nomadic Assemblages,” “Non-Oedipal Cartographies”, and “Space-Time Montages”, that work as one to negate absorption into the interiority of sovereign territory. These sections are not an attempt at corralling the nomadic spirit into separate enclosures; instead, they are bands of warriors that operate the violence of the hunted animal, dehumanized human others, and earth others. The chapters are in constant multi-vocal conversations with narratives that camp on the turbulent weathers of global transitory spaces. They charter real or intellectual turfs of interstitial/rhizomatic nomadic epistemologies as political resistance to the exclusionary practices of a violently wired world. This book will appeal to post-graduate students, researchers, and faculty in the departments of literature, comparative literary and cultural studies. Researchers in sociology, cultural anthropology, gender studies, and migration studies will also find the material applicable to the expanding approaches available in their fields.

Creating the Contemporary Circus is an examination and analysis of the creative process whereby such circuses as Cirque du Soleil, the Big Apple Circus and Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey develop their productions.