YES !! NeuroEpigenEthics is proud to give the floor to:
Professor Gunther Martens (Ghent University) & Liselotte Van der Gucht (Ghent University)
Exquisite Defects: Detoxing the Female Literary Genius at the Crossroads of Neurophenomenology and Neurodiversity
December 17th, 2021 @ 2.00 – 4.00 pm (CET)
Online: zoom
Attendance is free
Enroll by sending an email to leni.vangoidsenhoven@uantwerpen.be
You will receive the zoom link to the event one day before the lecture
Abstract
The “mad genius” has since long been a trope in literary history. Whereas the male genius’s accomplishments are emphasised over possibly accompanying shortcomings, the female genius and her deviance from the norm have been tolerated to a far lesser extent. As a result, exceptional literary creativity continues to be studied mainly from a masculine perspective. In recent years, experimental features of male authors are increasingly linked to patterns of neurodiversity, but these continue to be seen as strokes of genius, whereas female authors with similar eccentricities suffer heavily from stigma.
Our project can be situated in the field of Literary Studies, but takes cues from several other fields such as Neurophenomenology and Disability Studies to strengthen its interdisciplinarity. The main goal of the project is to re-evaluate four female German and Austrian literary authors through the lens of Neurodiversity and of theories of embodied, enacted, and extended (4E) cognition. The application of this analytical toolkit to literary texts and egodocuments allows us to provide an alternative to deficit-based definitions of neurodivergence and to the undiminished, spectacularized ‘othering’ of female literary and artistic talent. Specifically, we aim to find out how and why neurodiversity surfaces in the literary text by way of formal-narrative and thematic analysis, studying stylistic strategies and motifs of childhood and social non-conformism.
In this interdisciplinary lecture, we will highlight the methodological underpinnings of the project and present the case study of the German author and poet Else Lasker-Schüler, who embodied diversity in multiple facets. In particular, we explore her focus on visual and auditory aspects of language in its idiosyncrasy against the backdrop of patently transgressing borders not only between countries, but also between private and public, male and female, word, image, and sound. We hypothesize that the propensity to wrestle free from orthodox upbringings and to engage in polemical and polarizing communication, as well as to embody contrarian positions, may have come more “natural” to some women than to others.
Finally, we will situate the relevance of this project against the background of a discussion concerning the educational system, in which “efficient” teaching methods (especially of reading and writing skills) are increasingly promoted at the expense of more inclusive approaches. We witness a trend among specific scholars, especially austerity-minded education economists, to “hijack” the arguments of the neurodiversity movement in order to deny the reality of conditions like autism and dyslexia and to argue for the legitimacy of cutting down on accommodations. A renewed understanding of creative, literary communication as a spontaneous coping strategy can provide an antidote against the ongoing attempt to streamline and normalize cognition.