This panel asks how the politics of representing marginalized others through the postures, movement and appearance of their bodies is altered with the arrival of biopolitics as a key category in the study of twentieth-century literature. The field of ‘literature and medicine’ has arrived to the study of the various anglophone modernisms by various routes, including cultural studies, post-colonial theory, psychoanalysis, and not least the recent interest in vitalism. As it does so, it offers a tremendous opportunity to pivot our thinking of the ways these modernisms are shot through--and warped by—strategies of physical othering of human beings. Aggressive vitalisms (such as Futurism) castigated the tired and the meek; discourses of the normal and the conformist (as in the pre-and post WW II return to realism) othered the disabled and the ill; while defensive textual analogies of smooth white paper and mottled dark skin risked supporting versions of race hysteria in the eugenicist moment. The power of biopolitics and biopolitical readings, is to carry the matter of illness, exhaustion, and mottled, scarred body surfaces beyond their consideration as ‘symptoms.’ The end of the symptomatic reading, and of reading signs of otherness inscribed on bodies in modernist texts as medically ‘symptomatic,’ grants these othered bodies a new heft, demands for them a new cultural politics and a new readerly respect. This panel wishes to launch in modernist studies this recuperative work of centering, through the biopolitical lens, the scarred, disabled or simply horizontal othered bodies of modernism. Aches and lesions, from ALP’s aching back to Odysseus’ scar, exhausted muscles, and ‘ill writing’ matter more now, as the modernist body-theater of bios and zoë, in the high era of the Foucauldian ‘management of populations,’ effects a new relation of culture to life, and to otherness, on the plane of the physical.

Prof. Maud Ellmann’s paper, ‘Skin, Once Again’ sets up the terms and stakes of the medicalizing gaze in modernism, and the stakes of the biopolitical turn in rereading notions such as decadence (as a cultural category) and ‘degeneration’ (as, at the same moment, a reactionary, and quasi-scientific rationale for a new ‘management of populations’). Moving from the pivotal role played by Odysseus’ scar in Auerbach’s Mimesis, to moments of skin disease, of the welt, to the face without a mouth in horror fiction, Ellmann revisits her psychoanalytically-inflected work on the omphalos as wound in Joyce’s work to rethink the implications of a medicalized modernism: one concerned in ways hitherto untheorized with the cultural uses of the medical gaze, ‘wellness,’ health and the sustaining of life. She then turns to how pathologizing works public health to designate the propriety of specific subjects, and how this surfaces in literary culture.

Prof. Maurizia Boscagli’s paper, ‘Lazy, Modern, Exhausted: An Energy Crisis’ then broadens the topic to include the modernist fear of a lack of energy, in different versions of what she calls “horizontal modernism”, signified by the transgressive exhaustion and laziness of the modern body at rest. In the early twentieth century, rest and laziness, often associated with illness, stand in open contradiction with the productivist ethos of both the Taylorized laboring body, and with the energy-fueled aesthetics of canonical modernism (see Futurism, or the call to “make it new”). The persistence of the languor of the fin-de-siècle aesthete (as in the design of Charlotte Perriand and Eileen Grey), is in open opposition to the new the new culture of health and wellness, and as such it points to an energy crisis that culminates in a refusal of the work ethic and of the acceleration of modernity.

Prof. Marilyn Reizbaum’s paper, ‘Muriel Spark’s Disabled Narratives,’ then turns to the specific rhetorics of dis-ablement in the work of a key mid-century British writer, Muriel Spark. In 1959, Spark dramatized the disability of age as neutralized in/by Memento Mori. This paper considers the complementary disability of youth in her first novel, The Comforters (1957) and later in The Driver’s Seat (1970). Both exhibit narrative breakdowns, featuring a disabled author whose mental deficiency causes a break with omniscience. The paper will address the implications of this characterological/narrative disability for Spark’s aesthetics; The Driver’s Seat is often pathologized as “warped” or “sick” and condemned as “one not to love.” Instead, the imbalance of/in that narrative, over which Spark herself suffered while calling it her both favorite and most perfect work, is Spark’s commentary on narrative or other perfection, underscoring in D.A. Miller’s formulation “that ill writing in which all writing eventually recognizes itself.”