American Literature and Therapeutic Cultures
International conference at the House of Creation and Innovation (MaCI), University of Grenoble Alpes, June 14-16, 2023
in partnership with the Institute of Languages and Cultures of Europe, America, Africa, Asia and Australia (ILCEA4)
and the University Institute of France (IUF)
Organization :
Nicholas Manning (UGA/IUF)
Confirmed speakers:
Timothy Aubry, Isabelle Blondiaux, Beth Blum, Peter Boxall, Jean-Christophe Cloutier,
Thomas Constantinesco, Adam Frank, Martin Halliwell, Michael Jonik,
Rachel Greenwald Smith, Trysh Travis.
This international symposium, which will be held from June 14 to 16, 2023 at the Maison de la Création et de l’Innovation (MaCI) of the University of Grenoble Alpes, will explore the dynamic forces of attraction and antagonism at play between literary texts or traditions and a wide range of psychological discourses, from the 19th century to the present day, in light of the relatively recent concept of therapeutic culture. These reflections will continue during the 5th International Congress of the French Society for Modernist Studies (SEM) entitled Therapeutic Modernismsscheduled at UGA as part of the same project in June 2024.
American literary texts, oscillating between attraction and rejection, tend to reflect or even challenge a range of beliefs forged within the framework of therapeutic ideologies. Since New Criticism in particular, the various models theorizing the relationship between literature and psychology have shown themselves to be restrictive by attempting either to banish psychology, or to privilege certain discourses to the detriment of those perceived as “popular” or “alternative”. At the same time, common therapeutic notions – such as emotional intelligence, empathy, or interpersonal communication – are increasingly being used in the United States, often in problematic ways, to justify the cultural legitimacy of literature in the United States. moment when it appears to undergo a form of devaluation. Such utilitarian justifications must be questioned if we are to rethink the current and future cultural relevance of literary creation.
In order to explore this field, this conference will bring together specialists in American literature and culture, affect studies and the historical links between literature and psychology. For “therapeutic culture” constitutes a much broader field of investigation than that which traditionally interests literary theorists in their effort to think about the relationship between literature and psychology. How can we explain that these relationships have generally only been approached through psychoanalysis, to the exclusion of so many other therapeutic practices? What vision of the subject can therefore derive from an analysis considering the interactions of the literature with a wide spectrum of “psy cultures”, ranging from personal development manuals to natural health, from cognitive-behavioral therapies to Gestalt theory? , from New Age spirituality to narrative medicine? And how to explain that the belief that literary texts heal the wounds of the past, perfect the individual and offer psychological or spiritual support, has spread in contemporary times, at the very moment when the cultural value of literature appears? threatened?
Contrary to other approaches – and in particular those motivated by purely optimistic convictions as to the powers of “care” or “cure” of literature – the participants in this symposium are invited to take a critical look at these historical and contemporary trends. , questioning the utilitarian vision, in neoliberal societies, of literary texts as a healing device. Unlike initiatives that take a purely positive view of the links between literature and therapeutic ideologies, papers will ask whether the identification of literature as a healing technology has not also impeded its cultural enhancement. Questioning the myths of literature as a restorative device will therefore encourage us to reflect on new models of analysis of the literature-therapy interaction that go beyond the scientific positivism and cultural optimism of certain contemporary initiatives in the medical human sciences. .
This symposium and the editorial project associated with it do not aim to determine the place of literature in a so-called therapeutic culture, and in doing so to establish a static hierarchy similar to those posed by many of the models developed so far to think about the links between psychology and literature. Rather, it is a matter of apprehending the literary and the therapeutic as cultural environments that have not stopped actively remodeling each other. At the epicenter of an ever-expanding therapeutic ethos, American literature offers a unique opportunity to question this paradigm. For if the goal of self-improvement through art is at the foundation of the Victorian moral ethos, it is in the United States, in modern times – in a combination of capitalist fervor, cultural optimism and ideologies of autonomy – that the vision of literature as healing technology takes its most radical forms. This project therefore has as its temporal starting point the 1850s, in order to encompass the changes occurring just before, during and after the Civil War (1861-1865), which considerably modified the relationship between literature and therapeutic ideals.
The concept of therapeutic culture, conceived in response to conceptions deemed too limited of psychology and its influence, approaches the therapeutic as a vast set of practices and discourses with which the modern subject interacts. As Timothy Aubry and Trysh Travis, who will be present during these days, affirm in their collective volume Rethinking Therapeutic Culture: rather than being limited to an apparatus of curative or corrective strategies, the therapeutic “must be understood not only as a healing technology, even like a zeitgeist, but like a culture: a complex network of shared beliefs, behaviors and institutions, which bring people together and shape their values and ideals. »
It is this expanded sense of the therapeutic that this colloquium sets out to explore. Questioning the crucial influence of literary texts in this culture therefore amounts to investigating the side of the couch of the therapist or the psychiatric hospital, but also and above all in the direction of extra-institutional places and discourses.
The complex interactions that take place between the therapeutic and literary cultures indeed cross a wide spectrum including both clinical and extra-clinical contexts. Moreover, Afro-American, Hispanic and Latino, feminist and queer literatures show how therapeutic approaches often remain beyond the reach of victims of inequality and remain the prerogative of privileged groups, which they equip with new ideological or cultural weapons. . In this way, the objective of this event is not only to study literature “as” therapy, or in its relation to certain historically privileged discourses such as psychoanalysis, but to question more broadly the interactions between literary culture and therapeutic culture, from a transhistorical as well as a transdiscursive perspective.
Proposals for individual articles, panels or collective round tables are invited in the following non-exclusive fields:
- the relationships between American literary texts and specific psychological disciplines, methods and protocols such as cognitive-behavioral therapies, Gestalt, or discourses such as personal development
- shifting representations of cultures, places, and professions of psychology in American literary works
- the depiction of psychotherapy in American fiction, poetry, or drama
the psychotherapeutic experiences addressed by authors in autobiographical or autofiction texts
the contribution of therapeutic cultures to the creation of new literary genres (such as the sanatorium novel)
new approaches to the interactions between literature and psychoanalysis, beyond more traditional theoretical frameworks - the increasingly prevalent cultural trope in the United States and beyond of literature as the art of caring or healing, including the emergence of clinical practices such as bibliotherapy
the potential political or aesthetic risks of associating literature with therapeutic purposes, both during - American history and in the present moment
- paradigms of reception and the blurring for readers, within popular and scholarly cultures, of the boundaries between therapeutic and literary discourses
This brief list is indicative only, and submissions on a wide range of topics related to the connections between American literary and therapeutic cultures, in the broadest sense of both categories, are welcome.
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Proposals of 300 words maximum for individual communications, and 1000 words maximum for joint panels and round tables, must be sent before January 31, 2023 to the following address: nicholas.manning@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr
If possible, do not hesitate to indicate your intention to submit a communication proposal now in order to facilitate the logistical organization of the event.
A response as to the acceptance of the proposal will be given before February 15, 2023 at the latest.