1 SLSA 2016 Program with Abstracts This Is the Final Version of The

1 SLSA 2016 Program with Abstracts This is the final version of the program with abstracts, corresponding to the printed program. Any further updates will be indicated at registration. Session 1: Thursday, November 3, 11:45 AM-1:15 PM Panel 1A: Thursday, November 3, 11:45 AM-1:15 PM Ansley 1 (no AV) Creating Pathology Literature and science studies reminds us that pathology — far from a self-evident category — is often methodologically, culturally, or discursively produced. This panel explores the processes by which categories of pathology are created; it also addresses how ideas about pathology can be revised through attention to creative forms, particularly narrative. Andrew Gaedtke and Ajitpaul Mangat explore the intersections of mental difference, biography, and narrative, arguing that narrative’s emphasis on world-building and plasticity invites us to understand mental difference (schizophrenia and autism) in terms of creativity as opposed to disability or disease. Rebecah Pulsifer analyzes the discursive contexts in which pathological categories (autism and average intelligence) arise. Their papers demonstrate how pathological categories often emerge from creative interplay among disciplinary boundaries, and they argue that attention to these categories’ complex genealogies necessitates a more nuanced account of the relationship between the normative and the pathological. Together, the papers on this panel point to the ways in which the nexus of literature and science allows for the category of the pathological to be reimagined as creative, expressive, and different; in this way, they demonstrate how interdisciplinary inquiry puts pressure on pathological categories and the concept of pathology itself. Chair: Rebekah Pulsifer Creating Schizophrenia: On The Looping Effects of Human Kinds Andrew Gaedtke (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; [email protected]) Whereas schizophrenic delusions have often been dismissed or disregarded within clinical contexts as meaningless, this paper argues that they often perform critical cognitive operations through which minimal, phenomenological worlds are reconstituted in ways that share much with the world-building operations of fiction. I trace these effects through representations of schizophrenia in memoirs of psychosis and in the experimental fiction of Patrick Hamilton, Muriel Spark, and Will Self. This paper also engages with recent post-cognitive theories of delusion (Gallagher, Zahavi, Sass, Parnas) that identify the cognitive operations that are distorted or disabled in schizophrenia while also suggesting that delusions may perform reparative functions through which patients may create ad hoc, phenomenological worlds from the cultural discourses available to them. Secondly, I argue that these narratives manifest historical “looping effects” (Hacking) between the discourse of the mind sciences and the delusional language of 2 patients. I show that the worlds and self-experiences rendered in these texts are often adapted from the causal, explanatory models of psychiatry, cybernetics, neurology, and cognitive neuroscience to which these patients were exposed. Conversely, the metaphors patients use to explain or describe their experiences often become naturalized within psychiatric literature. Therefore, while I examine the cognitive and phenomenological operations that are creatively rendered by delusional narratives, I also demonstrate the ways in which a nosological category such as “schizophrenia” has been created through looping effects between patients and doctors. Pathologizing the Average Rebekah Pulsifer (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; [email protected]) In the 1970s and 80s, Raymond Cattell — one of the most influential and frequently cited psychologists of the twentieth century — published a number of monographs and articles on “Beyondism,” which he describes as a “rational religion” based on science. Beyondism argues that exceptional individuals’ scientific research is the appropriate guide for humans’ evolutionary advancement; it thus seeks to challenge what Cattell views as the sharp decline in average human intelligence. This paper explores the porous border between science and religion in Cattell’s work by contextualizing Beyondism in terms of emergent notions of so-called “general” or “average” intelligence in the mid-twentieth century. I suggest that at this cultural moment, many psychologists, including Cattell, register ambivalence about “average intelligence.” On the one hand, the purported benefit of Intelligence Quotient tests was to protect average intelligence from dilution from the so-called feeble-minded; on the other hand, Cattell and others pathologize average intelligence on the basis of its perceived fragility and deterioration. For this reason, I argue that mid-twentieth-century psychological discourse on average intelligence — as exemplified by Cattell’s theory of Beyondism — creates a new pathological category: the ordinary, the normal, or the average. This observation charges us to revise George Canguielm’s argument that the pathological produces the normal, which informs many contemporary approaches to biopolitics. Instead, Beyondism offers a case study that allows us to see how the normal can become the pathological. Creatively Destructive: Autism, Neuroscience, and the Plasticity of Narrative Ajitpaul Mangat (University at Buffalo; [email protected]) Autism necessitates a reconceptualization of the relationship between health and “deficit.” Neuroscience understands autism to be a destructive entity arising from a neurological impairment and resulting in a “lack” of “normal” communication skills. By contrast, Oliver Sacks understands autism in more productive terms, as creatively destructive: “No two people with autism are the same; its precise form or expression is different in every case. Moreover, there may be a most intricate (and potentially creative) interaction between the autistic traits and the other qualities of the individual.” What Sacks asserts here, I propose, is the plasticity of autism, which actively produces a diversity of forms and organizations. Drawing on the emphasis that Sacks places on writing, I argue that it is biography, or narrative, that best represents the creativity, or plasticity, of autism. I focus on the burgeoning genre of the autistic autobiography, or autie-biography. Where neuroscience relies on the “model,” which attempts to delimit the spectrum of autism as a fixed and static entity, the autie-biography attests to the plasticity of autism through the inherent semantic openness of narrative, which allows for 3 different autisms to emerge. I compare foundational autie-biographies by Temple Grandin and Donna Williams whose respective self-narrations act as means of contrasting self- determinations. In this way, I conclude that narrative offers an alternative form of knowledge to neuroscience, since narrative, in linking pathology and novelty, reveals life to be vulnerable and radically open to change. Panel 1B: Thursday, November 3, 11:45 AM-1:15 PM Ansley 2 (projector and screen) Narration and Authorship 1 Chair: David Horn Who Writes? Automatism and the Question of Authorship David Horn (Ohio State University; [email protected]) This paper examines the staging of automatic writing and the problem of authorship in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe, considering varied sites (the laboratory, the séance, the artist’s studio) at which such writing was produced, and its authorial status negotiated. Writing that was generated automatically—that is, without the conscious control or awareness of the writer—fascinated psychologists, spiritualists, and artists. For psychologists, it promised to reveal something about the nature of personality and the structure of consciousness; for spiritualists, it seemed to offer the possibility of communication with disembodied others; and for painters and poets, it signaled an unfettered, undisciplined creativity. But such writing also raised questions about authorship, about who or even what writes—a self, an other, a hand, a pencil—and with what kinds of agency, control, and legal rights. The production of automatic scripts was frequently conditioned by the will of others (the scientist, the deceased spirit, the clairvoyant's client) who called it forth, or else by specific forms of training and self-discipline aimed at erasing the self. I argue that the problem of authorship reveals automatic writing to be a complex and social practice structured by relations of power, real and imagined: the relations of the hypnotist/therapist and the patient, of the spirit and the medium, of the clairvoyant and the client, and of the artist and her conscious mind. Creative Desecration of Realism: Narrative as Self-Creation in Barchester Towers Madison Elkins (Emory University; [email protected]) In Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers, an enigmatic omniscient narrator given to self- reflexive intrusions looms large, warmly addressing readers and digressing on the art of writing. Scholars addressing Trollope’s narrator, such as John Kahn, Henry James, and Paul Lyons, have either maligned his self-referentiality as a failed, over-indulgent rhetorical device or have examined the narrator on a moral plane, vindicating his interjections as representative of Trollope’s professed authorial ethics. Yet these approaches, confined by a theoretical paucity that reduces all self-reflexivity to a desecration of realism, are unable to analyze Trollope’s

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