Kurzfassung

Throughout history, the human body has always been a controversial and much debated topic and constantly had to negotiate its place between glorification and vilification. Whereas the beauty and strength of people’s physical structure was praised and positively emphasised, the body’s diseases, flaws and frailties functioned as a constant reminder of human imperfection and the inevitability of natural decay. Despite the fact that the concept of the “body” has been discussed in academic...Throughout history, the human body has always been a controversial and much debated topic and constantly had to negotiate its place between glorification and vilification. Whereas the beauty and strength of people’s physical structure was praised and positively emphasised, the body’s diseases, flaws and frailties functioned as a constant reminder of human imperfection and the inevitability of natural decay. Despite the fact that the concept of the “body” has been discussed in academic research in recent years, the representation of the transient body – a body located at the intersections of significant phases of life – has not been given the attention it deserves. Against the background of declining fertility rates and ageing populations in Western societies as well as in the context of new paradigms in interdisciplinary research, such as the medical humanities, intersectionality and ageing studies, the high complexity of cultural attitudes towards the body and its metaphorical relevance are currently gaining more public awareness and challenge us to ask new questions. How are bodily rites-de-passage, such as birth, death, disease and decay represented in Anglophone literature, culture and media? Which narrative, aesthetic and medial strategies are employed to represent and document bodily transitions from one stage of life to another?

The one-day symposium aims at discussing these questions and related topics in the context of English and American Studies and invites papers addressing the transience of the human body as represented in Anglophone literature and culture from the eighteenth to the twenty- first century. We invite contributions from the fields of literary and cultural studies, media studies, art history, history of ideas, ageing studies and medical humanities.

The conference proceedings will be published in 2018» weiterlesen» einklappen