Overview

A history of dance s pathologization may startle readers who find in dance performance grace, discipline, geometry, poetry, and the body s transcendence of itself. Exploring dance s historical links to the medical and scientific connotations of a pathology, this book asks what has subtended the idealization of dance in the West. It investigates the nineteenth-century response, in the intersections of dance, literature, and medicine, to the complex and long-standing connections between illness, madness, poetry, and performance. In the nineteenth century, medicine becomes a major cultural index to measure the body s meanings. As a particularly performative form of madness, nineteenth-century hysteria preserved the traditional connection to dance in medical descriptions of choreas. In its withholding of speech and its use of body code, dance, like hysteria, functions as a form of symptomatic expression.

Full Product Details

9780804735247

Table of Contents

Reviews

'Dance Pathologies synthesizes original research and critical theory to illuminate crucial issues in at least three fields: French literature and cultureof the nineteenth century; dance history and feminist performance theory; modern medicine, including psychoanalysis and its discontents. McCarren skillfully makes the reader feel strangely at home among so many uncanny juxtapositions. This book harvests the fruits of a decade of critical rethinking about Freud and Lacan and historical research into the history of medicine to rewrite the history of dance in literature, as literature, and against literature. In that way it is without rivals.' Joseph Roach, Yale University

Author Information

Felicia McCarren is Assistant Professor of French at Tulane University.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available