Modernism and Physical Illness: Sick Books by Peter Fifield (review)

IF 0.2 4区 文学 0 LITERATURE LITERATURE AND MEDICINE Pub Date : 2024-08-30 DOI:10.1353/lm.2024.a935844
Jeremy Colangelo
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Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 272 pp. Hardcover, $80.00. <p>Peter Fifield's monograph <em>Modernism and Physical Illness</em> comes out at a time when modernism studies has been re-discovering illness and the body, with major texts like Elizabeth Outka's <em>Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature</em>, Michael Davidson's <em>Invalid Modernism: Disability and the Missing Body of the Aesthetic</em>, and Maren Linett's <em>Bodies of Modernism: Physical Disability in Transatlantic Modernist Literature</em> showing the steady interest among scholars in this area.<sup>1</sup> Fifield's book is a worthy contribution to the research on illness in modernist literature, and a necessary one as well, for it serves as an important corrective to the broader tendency to see the major canonical works of modernist literature as disembodied, cerebral, and concerned mainly with abstractions. Instead, as Fifield argues, \"illness is a central preoccupation of literary modernism,\" not only in the sense of it being a recurrent topic, but also in the sense of illness helping create literary modernism as it eventually became (1). Modern medical technology, he writes, results in \"a transformation of bodily experience that renders the human subject at once more and less than its antecedents\" (224). Changes in medical technology alter how subjects relate to their bodies, and by extension alter the way those bodies become the subject of art. In chronicling this process, Fifield shows how the medicalized subject is \"both private … and collective,\" at once isolated in the sickbed and plugged into a complex social and technological network (227). Illness and medicine thus played a key role in producing \"modernism's capacity for estranging the world,\" a capacity which is characteristic of the movement (228). <strong>[End Page 229]</strong></p> <p>Fifield frames his book against Virginia Woolf's essay \"On Being Ill,\" where she argues that literature has in general neglected illness. The broad strokes of her argument are likely familiar to the readers of this journal—\"novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid\"<sup>2</sup>—but of special interest here is her subsequent claim that the lack of writing on illness has left authors without a vocabulary to describe it, leading to a retreat into abstraction. Fifield provides ample evidence to the contrary, though in doing so he also hitches his argument to Woolf's, a choice with both benefits and drawbacks. When discussing literature, British literary modernists could indeed divert into the transcendental, but they were just as able to focus on the mundane and the minute, the everyday business of being ill, and the way that illness merged with the business of having a body at all. Situating himself explicitly in the context of the medical humanities, Fifield approaches the question of diseases through their role in the \"entanglement\" of the body \"in a rich and complex experiential world, rather than an objective phenomenon that floats above subjects, culture, institutions, language, and practice\" (28). His point here is not that the objective element of a disease is unimportant, but rather that diseases, in persisting across vast and sometimes ancient networks of transmission, acquire important figurative and symbolic value which then affects the ways those diseases are understood, experienced, and represented. One need only look at the cultural history of tuberculosis, as Fifield does in his chapter on D. H. Lawrence, to see that process at work. Fifield, in casting his book against Woolf's essay, therefore performs a task that is as much an excavation as it is an explication, looking past her claim that the writing of illness lacks a history to link modernist studies with the discourse of which her essay was already a part.</p> <p>Yet I also wonder what kind of book <em>Modernism and Physical Illness</em> could have been had it not comported itself in a largely reactive way or had not put so much emphasis on disproving Woolf. Certainly, a corrective is needed here, but at the same time the text seems to leave some questions tantalizingly open. 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Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:

  • Modernism and Physical Illness: Sick Books by Peter Fifield
  • Jeremy Colangelo (bio)
Peter Fifield. Modernism and Physical Illness: Sick Books. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 272 pp. Hardcover, $80.00.

Peter Fifield's monograph Modernism and Physical Illness comes out at a time when modernism studies has been re-discovering illness and the body, with major texts like Elizabeth Outka's Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature, Michael Davidson's Invalid Modernism: Disability and the Missing Body of the Aesthetic, and Maren Linett's Bodies of Modernism: Physical Disability in Transatlantic Modernist Literature showing the steady interest among scholars in this area.1 Fifield's book is a worthy contribution to the research on illness in modernist literature, and a necessary one as well, for it serves as an important corrective to the broader tendency to see the major canonical works of modernist literature as disembodied, cerebral, and concerned mainly with abstractions. Instead, as Fifield argues, "illness is a central preoccupation of literary modernism," not only in the sense of it being a recurrent topic, but also in the sense of illness helping create literary modernism as it eventually became (1). Modern medical technology, he writes, results in "a transformation of bodily experience that renders the human subject at once more and less than its antecedents" (224). Changes in medical technology alter how subjects relate to their bodies, and by extension alter the way those bodies become the subject of art. In chronicling this process, Fifield shows how the medicalized subject is "both private … and collective," at once isolated in the sickbed and plugged into a complex social and technological network (227). Illness and medicine thus played a key role in producing "modernism's capacity for estranging the world," a capacity which is characteristic of the movement (228). [End Page 229]

Fifield frames his book against Virginia Woolf's essay "On Being Ill," where she argues that literature has in general neglected illness. The broad strokes of her argument are likely familiar to the readers of this journal—"novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid"2—but of special interest here is her subsequent claim that the lack of writing on illness has left authors without a vocabulary to describe it, leading to a retreat into abstraction. Fifield provides ample evidence to the contrary, though in doing so he also hitches his argument to Woolf's, a choice with both benefits and drawbacks. When discussing literature, British literary modernists could indeed divert into the transcendental, but they were just as able to focus on the mundane and the minute, the everyday business of being ill, and the way that illness merged with the business of having a body at all. Situating himself explicitly in the context of the medical humanities, Fifield approaches the question of diseases through their role in the "entanglement" of the body "in a rich and complex experiential world, rather than an objective phenomenon that floats above subjects, culture, institutions, language, and practice" (28). His point here is not that the objective element of a disease is unimportant, but rather that diseases, in persisting across vast and sometimes ancient networks of transmission, acquire important figurative and symbolic value which then affects the ways those diseases are understood, experienced, and represented. One need only look at the cultural history of tuberculosis, as Fifield does in his chapter on D. H. Lawrence, to see that process at work. Fifield, in casting his book against Woolf's essay, therefore performs a task that is as much an excavation as it is an explication, looking past her claim that the writing of illness lacks a history to link modernist studies with the discourse of which her essay was already a part.

Yet I also wonder what kind of book Modernism and Physical Illness could have been had it not comported itself in a largely reactive way or had not put so much emphasis on disproving Woolf. Certainly, a corrective is needed here, but at the same time the text seems to leave some questions tantalizingly open. In the book's epilogue, Fifield describes how, in an earlier plan for...

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现代主义与身体疾病:彼得-菲菲尔德的《病书》(评论)
以下是内容的简要摘录,以代替摘要:评论者: 现代主义与身体疾病:彼得-菲菲尔德的《病书》 杰里米-科兰杰洛(简历) 彼得-菲菲尔德。现代主义与身体疾病:病书》。牛津:牛津大学出版社,2020 年。272 pp.精装,80.00 美元。彼得-菲菲尔德(Peter Fifield)的专著《现代主义与身体疾病》出版之际,正值现代主义研究重新发掘疾病与身体之际,主要著作包括伊丽莎白-奥特卡(Elizabeth Outka)的《病毒性现代主义》(Viral Modernism:迈克尔-戴维森(Michael Davidson)的《残缺的现代主义》(Invalid Modernism:残疾与美学中缺失的身体》,以及 Maren Linett 的《现代主义的身体》:1 菲菲尔德的这本书对现代主义文学中的疾病研究做出了值得称道的贡献,同时也是必要的贡献,因为它对将现代主义文学中的主要经典作品视为非实体、大脑和主要关注抽象概念的广泛倾向起到了重要的纠正作用。相反,正如菲菲尔德所言,"疾病是文学现代主义的核心关注点",这不仅是指疾病是一个反复出现的话题,还指疾病帮助创造了最终成为现代主义的文学(1)。他写道,现代医学技术导致了 "身体体验的转变,使人类主体既多于又少于其前身"(224)。医疗技术的变化改变了主体与其身体的关系,进而改变了这些身体成为艺术主体的方式。在记录这一过程时,菲菲尔德展示了医疗主体是如何 "既是私人的......又是集体的",既在病床上与世隔绝,又融入了复杂的社会和技术网络(227)。因此,疾病和医学在产生 "现代主义疏远世界的能力 "方面发挥了关键作用,而这种能力正是现代主义运动的特征(228)。[弗吉尼亚-伍尔夫(Virginia Woolf)在《论生病》一文中指出,文学普遍忽视了疾病。本刊读者可能对她论述的大体内容并不陌生--"人们本以为,小说会专门描写流行性感冒;史诗会描写伤寒 "2,但这里特别值得关注的是她随后提出的观点,即由于缺乏对疾病的描写,作家们缺乏描述疾病的词汇,从而陷入了抽象的境地。菲菲尔德提供了大量相反的证据,不过这样做他也将自己的论点与伍尔夫的论点挂钩,这种选择有利有弊。在讨论文学时,英国文学现代派确实可以转向超验,但他们也同样可以关注世俗和细微之处,关注生病的日常事务,以及疾病与拥有身体这一事务的融合方式。费菲尔德明确地将自己置于医学人文学科的背景下,通过疾病在 "丰富而复杂的经验世界中 "与身体的 "纠缠 "中的作用来探讨疾病问题,而不是将疾病视为漂浮在主体、文化、机构、语言和实践之上的客观现象"(28)。他在这里并不是说疾病的客观因素不重要,而是说疾病在巨大的、有时甚至是古老的传播网络中持续存在,获得了重要的形象和象征价值,进而影响到人们理解、体验和表现这些疾病的方式。我们只需看看肺结核的文化史,正如菲菲尔德在其关于 D. H. 劳伦斯的章节中所做的那样,就能看到这一过程的作用。因此,菲菲尔德在他的书中以伍尔夫的文章为蓝本,完成了一项既是挖掘又是阐释的任务,他超越了伍尔夫关于对疾病的书写缺乏历史的说法,将现代主义研究与伍尔夫文章中的话语联系起来。然而,我也在想,如果这本书不是以一种主要是被动的方式进行编排,或者不是如此强调对伍尔夫的反驳,它又会是一本什么样的书呢?当然,这里需要纠正,但与此同时,文本似乎也留下了一些诱人的问题。在该书的后记中,菲菲尔德描述了在早先的计划中,他是如何...
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来源期刊
CiteScore
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期刊介绍: Literature and Medicine is a journal devoted to exploring interfaces between literary and medical knowledge and understanding. Issues of illness, health, medical science, violence, and the body are examined through literary and cultural texts. Our readership includes scholars of literature, history, and critical theory, as well as health professionals.
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Gaspare Tagliacozzi and Early Modern Surgery: Faces, Men, and Pain by Paolo Savoia (review) Leprosy and Identity in the Middle Ages: From England to the Mediterranean ed. by Elma Brenner and François-Olivier Touati (review) Modernism and Physical Illness: Sick Books by Peter Fifield (review) The Routledge Companion to Health Humanities ed. by Paul Crawford, Brian Brown, and Andrea Charise (review) Contributors
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