WiSe 2020/21: Contact Zones in the Study of Culturehttps://www.uni-giessen.de/en/faculties/ggkgcsc/events/knlseries/knlarchive/wise-2020-21https://www.uni-giessen.de/@@site-logo/logo.png
Document Actions
WiSe 2020/21: Contact Zones in the Study of Culture
Maura Spiegel (Columbia University, USA)
Narrative Medicine at Work: Giving and Receiving Accounts of Self
Telling and listening are at the heart of the clinical encounter. Helping clinicians understand the co-constructed and situational complexity of that basic dynamic in healthcare is one of the many clinical applications of Narrative Medicine. This discussion will draw on a range of thinkers and fields, including Mikhail Bakhtin, John Dewey, Relational Psychoanalysis and Narrative Therapy to introduce the growing scholarly and clinical project of Narrative Medicine.
Literary scholar Peter Parsisi observes that “[the] real object of literary study is not to bring readers a message, but to bring them into a mode of attention.” Close reading of literary and other artistic work is the signature method in this field. Surprisingly, it is through shared experiences of this kind that clinicians discover new ways to encounter the intersubjective, narratological, and existential dimensions of those they treat –and of caregiving itself.
My case study for this talk, Ambrose Bierce’s “One of the Missing,” is literary fiction; my theoretical argument, however, is broader: it concerns narrative cognition as an elementary sensemaking resource, and how cultural forms of narrative negotiate with it in semiotic media. I want to suggest that contingency in fiction is a marker of the gap between the reductive but efficient sense-making of narrative and the unmanageable systemic complexity of experience. Narrative contingency, in other words, is symptomatic of the way our cognitive dependence upon a basic narrative logic strongly constrains how we understand complexity; but sophisticated cultural forms of narrative, including literary fiction, work to loosen these constraints – principally by exploiting two intrinsic features of narrative, which are its reflexiveness, and the irreducible narrative function of the implicit. Literary fiction chafes at the limits of narrative sense-making by subjecting narrative logic to the complex processes of its own articulation within a semiotic system, displacing interpretative interest from its sequential logic onto the circulation of meaning within the complex networks of signification that narrative itself cannot help generating. One of the effects of this reflexive movement, I suggest, is to continually confront narrative sense-making with the unassimilable in contingency, and so return it to the frontier of its encounter with phenomena, the threshold of emergent meaning where narrative cognition supervenes upon embodied experience.
Telling and listening are at the heart of the clinical encounter. Helping clinicians understand the co-constructed and situational complexity of that basic dynamic in healthcare is one of the many clinical applications of Narrative Medicine. This discussion will draw on a range of thinkers and fields, including Mikhail Bakhtin, John Dewey, Relational Psychoanalysis and Narrative Therapy to introduce the growing scholarly and clinical project of Narrative Medicine.
Literary scholar Peter Parsisi observes that “[the] real object of literary study is not to bring readers a message, but to bring them into a mode of attention.” Close reading of literary and other artistic work is the signature method in this field. Surprisingly, it is through shared experiences of this kind that clinicians discover new ways to encounter the intersubjective, narratological, and existential dimensions of those they treat –and of caregiving itself.
What is the status of the literary representation of music in the age of media-technological reproducibility? In our digital age, computers and earphones allow the listener to experience the bodily affective immersion in a seemingly limitless cyberspace of music files, whose aura they can project back onto their surroundings, transforming reality into resonant projection screens of their own fantasies, desires, and aesthetic sentiments. The possibilities and limitations of these digitally mediated atmospheres open up a new understanding of the literary representation of musical experiences by high-modernist writers.
A comparison between Thomas Mann's description of the production of musical entrancement by the fashionable gramophone in Der Zauberberg and Georg Trakl's poetic exploration of the Orpheus myth in "Passion" reveals a hidden conflict in early 20th century culture between state-of-the-art media-technological reproducibility and a seemingly anachronistic exploration of "live" or "real-time" musical atmospheres whose immersive affect and hermeneutic meanings exceed the acoustic data storage capacities of technological media while allowing themselves to be represented authentically by the literary imagination. Theoretical work on technological media (W. Benjamin and F. Kittler), the phenomenology of atmospheres (H. Schmitz, G. Böhme, T. Griffero) and sonic resonances (H. Rosa) will be brought together to explore this largely uncharted territory encompassing sound studies, philosophy, and literary criticism.
Documentary is not simply a neutral medium to record reality. Rather, it participates in the social imaginations of reality as a contested terrain. This paper discusses how documentaries activate the imaginations of radioactive waste. While many documentaries and scholarly discourses have tended to localize and nationalize the issues of radiation since the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident, radiation is fundamentally a global matter in that it is produced and distributed through the transnational network from the front end (uranium mining) to the back end (nuclear waste disposal), is supported by the economic and political worldwide network, and may damage the entire earth. Moreover, supposed that the only way to dispose radioactive waste is to bury it in the deeply excavated repository (1,710 feet underground in the case of Onkalo, Finland), radioactive waste literally and symbolically epitomizes the Anthropocene, the geological epoch in which humans have intervened in the planet to a significant degree. But, at the same time, this very abstract and gigantic nature makes it difficult for us to imagine radioactive waste. It is against this background that documentaries have played vital roles in bringing concrete imaginations about the social and ecological reality. Taking Waste: The Nuclear Nightmare (Éric Guéret, 2009) and Charka (Shimada Kei, 2017), among others, for case studies, I will explore how these documentaries alike problematize radioactive waste but evoke different imaginations of it. It is particularly interesting to see how a film shows radioactive waste as the otherwise invisible global material and institutional reality in which radioactive waste are unevenly distributed so that privileged people can enjoy their electric lives by at once exploiting and marginalizing other people near these sites.
