Global Disease: Language(s) and the Literary Imagination

该项目旨在对现代语言研究可能有助于医学人文工作的方式产生原创性的欣赏，这些工作旨在了解语言和文学在构建流行和专业疾病理解中的作用。为了帮助形成一个新的国际视角，在医学人文，包括全球文化和外语的丰富性和多样性，研究方案的核心奖学金需要作为其重点的作用，法国文学塑造的理解和应对梅毒，十九世纪最致命的，毁容和传染性疾病。尽管19世纪的法国医学和想象力丰富的作家们都在努力完成描绘梅毒的任务，但仍然缺乏对文学在塑造对这种疾病的理解方面所扮演的角色的研究。现有的研究认为梅毒和文学之间的关系，当时是统一的，他们集中在疾病的隐喻阅读方式，作为一个代理，以消除混乱，溶解和病态，被认为是，特别是在颓废的想象中，以消除现代生活。作为奖学金的一部分，研究回应了这样一个事实，即这些研究中的每一项都低估了文学在提供一种文本性方面的作用，这种文本性构成了对疾病的理解。相反，通过（大多被忽视的）散文，诗歌和医学论文的密切和比较阅读，它将调查在疾病的框架医学文学的协同作用。以下问题将指导其概念的发展：疾病以何种方式在文本生产中留下不可磨灭的印记？科学和文学话语如何发展对疾病的相互加强的理解？疾病是如何在文本上跨越体裁和学科界限传播的？对这些问题的回答将开启对疾病和文学铭文之间的等同性的新的理解，并为探索十九世纪法国梅毒文学叙事可能被视为一个患病的身体的方式奠定了基础--对话语感染开放，受到留下不可磨灭印记的病毒神话的污染，一直在努力寻找一种语言来表达痛苦的生活经历。从这一核心研究计划中，将产生两项合作活动，并允许建立一个雄心勃勃的全球医学文学文化后续研究议程：一个探讨法语世界文学如何代表患者对“医学凝视”的抵抗的会议;一个国际的，多语言会议，研究欧洲外语疾病叙述增加现有文化的具体手段（主要是英语国家）对患者用于交流疼痛体验的语言的理解。还将利用两项影响力活动来提高学生和广大公众对从现代语言角度处理全球医疗保健的一些关键挑战的价值和好处的理解：为医学生举办的跨文化健康讲习班将反思全球医学实践的语言和文化机遇和挑战;而作为QUB开放学习世界文学系列的一部分，为公众举办的“痛苦中的人”客座讲座将解释如何从现代语言的角度研究19世纪法国梅毒作家的个人日记，提供了丰富而迷人的现象学意义，疾病的主观和经验方面。

This project aims to generate original appreciations of the ways in which research in modern languages may contribute to work in the medical humanities which seeks to understand the role of language and literature in the construction of popular and professional understandings of disease. In a bid to help forge a new international perspective in medical humanities that embraces the richness and diversity of global cultures and foreign languages, the research programme at the heart of the Fellowship takes as its focus the role played by French literature in shaping understandings of and responses to syphilis, the nineteenth century's most deadly, disfiguring and contagious disease. Although the task of representing syphilis exercised medical and imaginative writers in nineteenth-century France, there remains a lack of research on the role played by literature in shaping understandings of the disease. Existing studies that consider the relationship between syphilis and literature at the time are united by their concentration on the ways in which the disease is read metaphorically, as a proxy to characterise the disorder, dissolution and sick(li)ness that were thought, especially in the decadent imagination, to characterise modern life. Research as part of the Fellowship responds to the fact that each of these studies downplays the role of literature in offering a textuality that frames and shapes understandings of disease. Instead, through close and comparative readings of (mostly neglected) prose, poetry, and medical treatises, it will investigate medico-literary synergies in the framing of disease. The following questions will guide its conceptual development: in what ways does disease leave its indelible mark in textual production? How do scientific and literary discourses develop a mutually-reinforcing understanding of disease? How is disease textually transmitted across genres and disciplinary boundaries? Answers to these questions will open up new appreciations of the equivalences between disease and literary inscription, and set the scene for an exploration of the ways in which the nineteenth-century French syphilis literary narrative might be approached as a diseased body -- open to discursive infection, subject to contamination by viral myths that leave their indelible mark, and all the while struggling to find a language to articulate the lived experience of being in pain. From this core research programme two collaborative events will flow and allow for the establishment of an ambitious follow-on research agenda on global medico-literary cultures: a conference which explores the ways in which literature from the French-speaking world represents patient resistance to the 'medical gaze'; and an international, multilingual conference examining the culturally-specific means by which European foreign-language illness narratives add to existing (and primarily Anglophone) understandings of the language patients use to communicate the experience of being in pain. Two impact events will also be used to enhance students' and the wider public's understanding of the value and benefits of approaching some of the key challenges of global healthcare from the perspective of modern languages: a workshop on intercultural health for medical students will reflect on the linguistic and cultural opportunities and challenges of practising global medicine; while a guest lecture on 'The Person in Pain' to members of the public as part of the QUB Open Learning World Literature series will explain how research from a modern languages perspective into the personal diaries of the syphilitic writer in nineteenth-century France offers a rich and fascinating sense of the phenomenological, subjective and experiential side of disease.