090120 UE Literature and Medicine (2019S)

This course will explore the intersections of medical, psychiatric, and literary discourses in Greece at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The research and experiments of Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière, and the essays of Pierre Janet, Richard Krafft-Ebing and Sigmund Freud on trauma and hysteria, radically changed the modern concept of the relation between mind and body, and, in Western Europe, led to an unprecedented mutual "contagion" between medicine and literature. We will look at the reception and transformations of these developments in Greek literature and criticism, with a double focus on translated and original texts. Among issues of interest will be: how fin-de-siècle psychiatric and psychological research shapes the genre of phantastic literature (e.g. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Bram Stoker, Dracula, Guy de Maupassant, Le Horla (1887)), and how, in turn, psychology motivates the translation and impact of phantastic literature in Greece, especially in the case of Alexandros Papadiamantis; disease and medicine in the work of Pavlos Nirvanas and the early medicalization of literary criticism in his essays; the impact of fin-de-siècle medical discourse and the connections between medicine, sexuality, and religion in the work of C.P. Cavafy; the transition from the beautiful sick body in aestheticism to the corpse and the living dead of naturalism (selections from Vizyinos, Episkopopoulos, Karkavitsas, Kondylakis, Psycharis); the reception of neurological and psychiatric discourses in the work of Emmanouil Roidis.