‘French Autopathography’
Special Issue of L’Esprit Créateur (to be published in summer 2016)
Call for Proposals
The dehumanizing medical separation of often minute entities of the patient’s body from his or her integral identity as person was conceptualised powerfully by Michel Foucault in his writings on the ‘medical gaze’ in Naissance de la clinique in 1963. Reacting against the cultural commonplace that ill people ‘surrender their bodies to medicine’ (Arthur Frank), the emergence of autopathographies, the telling of the patient’s story, seeks to articulate an experience that medicine alone cannot describe, for the dominant authority of medicine conspires, in sociologist Arthur Frank’s words, to ‘take away voice’. As Anne Hunsaker Hawkins has stated, ‘it is in restoring the patient’s voice to the medical enterprise that the study of autopathography has its greatest importance and offers its greatest promise’.
This special issue of L’Esprit Créateur will investigate a distinctly rich but critically neglected tradition of French autopathography. In an effort to further our understanding of the literary and aesthetic enterprise of writing the self, and to promote interdisciplinary dialogue across genres (literature, film, philosophy) and the so-called ‘two cultures’ of science and the arts, the term autopathography will be interpreted in a broad sense to embrace not only literature and creative writing, but also first-person documentary and visual forms. It is anticipated that a wide range of illnesses, disabilities and disorders will be covered in the articles gathered in the special issue, including AIDS, cancer, physical pain, mental health issues, locked-in syndrome, and madness.
Colleagues are invited to submit proposals on the subject of ‘French Autopathography’ to the guest editor, Dr Steven Wilson, at the following email address: steven.wilson@qub.ac.uk. Proposals should take the form of a short abstract (in English or French) of c. 300 words. Abstracts should be received by Monday 15th June. If accepted, authors should be prepared to send completed articles (in English or French) of up to 6000 words, including notes, by 20th November.