Föreläsning: An Incurable Melancholy
Schedule
Thu Feb 27 2025 at 06:00 pm to 08:00 pm
UTC+01:00Location
Stadsbiblioteket i Malmö | Malmö, SN
En föreläsning på engelska om kroppslig sjukdom, mental hälsa och litterär ambition i en dagbok från en flicka på 1800-talet. Föreläsningen utgår ifrån Emily Shores extensiva dagbok och leds av Virginia Langum. Föreläsning inleds med en beskrivning av det historiska sambandet mellan melankoli, överarbete och tuberkulos inom medicin och kultur. Därefter kommer föreläsningen att utforska det komplexa förhållandet mellan Shores framställning av sin fysiska och mentala hälsa samt de förebilder hon kan ha stött på, avvisat och efterliknat.
Tidigare samma dag håller Virginia Langum i en bokcirkel om "A Matter of Appearance" by Emily Wells: facebook.com/events/563732789834082/
Plats: Röda rummet, våning 1 på Malmö stadsbibliotek
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IN ENGLISH
Emily Shore (1819-1839) left an extraordinary journal of which about 300,000 words have survived. She died of consumption, or what we now know as tuberculosis, just before her twentieth birthday. The romantic image of consumption – the young creative person burning bright, snuffed out by sickness too early – was current in Shore’s lifetime.
Shore both fulfills and complicates this image. Contrary to the aesthetic death and mild symptoms offered in other contemporary accounts, Shore is frank about her excruciating pain and suffering. She also details her melancholy, and wonders whether it is provoked or exacerbated by her failing physical health. Melancholy had long been linked to consumption and genius, and from the late eighteenth century, doctors specifically warned about the sedentary life of the mind as cause of melancholy and consumption.
The effects of intellectual overwork is a preoccupation of Shore’s journal, and she explores the effects of her study on her body and mind. Although she writes persistently (plays, novels, poetry and scientific texts), Shore never directly links herself to the famous consumptives she reads and comments upon, such as George Herbert, Henry Kirke White and John Keats.
This talk will begin by delineating the historical relationship between melancholy, overwork and consumption in medicine and culture. Then it will explore the complex relationship between Shore’s self-representation of her physical and mental health, and the models she may have encountered, rejected and emulated.
Virginia Langum is a professor of English literature at Umeå University and the director of the Graduate School for the Faculty of Arts, coordinator of the Umeå Medical Humanities Network, and editor of The Nordic Journal of English Studies.
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Föreläsningen är en del av en serie – "Om galenskap" – i sex delar:
19 januari klockan 19–21
The Maddening Impossibility of Ending
Plats: Anti Bokhandel
6 februari klockan 18–20
Galenskap och kreativitet
Plats: Skovgaardsalen, Malmö konstmuseum
27 februari klockan 18–20
An Incurable Melancholy: bodily sickness, mental health and literary ambition in a 19th century girl’s diary
Plats: Röda rummet, Malmö stadsbibliotek
6 april klockan 13–15
Ovartaci: Madness and Creation
Plats: Skovgaardsalen, Malmö konstmuseum
4 maj klockan 15–17
Jumping Out of One's Skin: Madness and the Tactile
Plats: Röda rummet, Malmö stadsbibliotek
22 maj klockan 18–20
Om antipsykiatri
Plats: Röda rummet, Malmö stadsbibliotek
Serien görs av Aning – Förening för Filosofi och Psykoanalys i samarbete med Stadsbiblioteket, Malmö konstmuseum, Anti Bokhandel, Psykoterapicentrum, Bertil Wennborgs stiftelse och Folkuniversitetsföreningen.
