Book Description
This book focuses on liminal bodies and their delicate transaction with themselves and other people’s bodies. More specifically, it explores the spatiality and discourses of the body dying; the body opened in surgery, or through MRIs, CATs, and sometimes in autopsies; the body preserved through computerized images such as those created by the Visual Human Project; the metonymic body that continues to live in another body through organ replacement; and the bodily parts cast in silver, and then abandoned in a museum. This study also analyzes the discourses of the contemporary body commissioned by the vast industry of mass-media. This type of body has started to direct itself toward frugal, almost furtive pleasures; consequently—unlike those seriously affected by illnesses—a body constantly guarded by fear eventually runs on empty, becomes a corps-déjà-vu, and thus moves toward different types of minimal and liminal topology. The primary works examined include memoirs (Marjorie Williams’s “Hit by Lightning: A Cancer Memoir,” Arthur W. Frank’s At the Will of the Body: Reflections on Illness, Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals), films (Alejandro Amenábar’s The Sea Inside, Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru, Pedro Almodóvar’s All about My Mother), stories (Marisa Silver’s “Night Train to Frankfurt”), visual artworks (as accomplished by Jo Spence, David Wojnarowicz, Félix Gonzales-Torres, and Natalie Horne) and plays (Bryony Lavery’s Last Easter, Paula Vogel’s Baltimore Waltz, William Hoffman’s As Is), which are read comparatively, namely as works positioned at the intersection between literature/visual art and social diaries. This book has become part of the collections of the world’s leading universities: Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, the Library of Congress, and more.
