Research Statement:
The Novel and the Case History
Meegan Kennedy
Florida State University
Examining the relationship between modern literary and medical narratives offers a fruitful perspective on the nineteenth-century British novel. I read novels and medical narratives against one another, using literary and historical analysis, in order to understand how the disciplines of literature and medicine developed in and through texts. Overall, I argue that the rich genre of the medical case history - which boasts an extensive, though little-known, archive - offers scholars significant insight into the history and context of the novel.
Why? First, the case history foregrounds its status as a text, even a "literary" text, by poaching literary discourse from the novel. Medical authors constitute a genre of the case history through a disciplinary anxiety arising from their incorporation of medical "fact" into a record shaped by the conventions of narrative. Case histories through the nineteenth century are texts woven from diverse discourses - curious, spectacular, clinical, sentimental, Gothic, romantic, sensational, realist - each entailing particular professional and class benefits and disadvantages. Experimentalist and scientific ideologies, as well as nineteenth-century literary criticism, largely construe these discourses as conflicting. It is just this kind of text that most richly rewards the kind of literary and cultural analysis now valued by literary critics.
Second, the novel also borrows from the case history. The trend in recent criticism has been to identify seemingly non-literary prose genres as models for the novel, but the medical case history has largely escaped scrutiny. Recent critics such as Nancy Armstrong, Lennard Davis, J. Paul Hunter, Michael McKeon, Leah Price, and others discuss the importance of early modern prose genres as models of novelistic narrative: the newspaper, travel narrative, captivity narrative, spiritual autobiography, conduct book, and anthology. The case history, although largely unacknowledged by criticism on the early novel, provides a compelling example of a developing narrative model, one which illustrates the importance of rhetorical strategies in constructing disciplinarity as difference. It offered the emerging genre of the novel a model of narrative in which fictional status, and the attempt to represent historicity, took on tremendous significance.
Third, the formal and generic evolution of the case history roughly tracks, and illuminates, that of the novel. Like the novel, the case history traces a path from the unabashedly "curious" sensibility of the eighteenth-century case history, through the realism of the clinical era, dedicated to the precise rendition of surfaces, and finally blossoms inward with Freud. And like the novel, the case history demonstrates two disjunct strands in its realist and romantic discursive traditions, the second of which it represses during much of the nineteenth century.
Finally, the case history shares one of the novel's major concerns: how to narrativize the self. If the novel is a textual mechanism for producing subjectivity, the case history similarly constructs the modern subject. Of course, its text, by combining previous history, patient autobiography, and chronicle of observation, helps to constitute not a fictional but a real historical subject through narrative. But by corralling the experience of the body within particular categories of the self, the case history provides an alternative narrative structure which makes available to the culture at large - and to the novel in particular - the model of a coherent subjectivity accumulated through experience.
My work argues for a cultural studies of medicine that attends more closely to the text, as well as to its culture. I hope to deepen our understanding of both literature and medicine in the nineteenth century, through a rigorous analysis of textuality as it shapes the history and culture of disciplines.