Translationality as transformation in the medical humanities

What is it about?

The first essay is the medical humanities: the Capgras Delusion as explored in Richard Powers' The Echo Maker, with spin-off considerations of Jean Baudrillard's simulacra in various literary and media applications. The second essay is the translational humanities: a history of (medical and fictional) literature as a series of translations, from Galen to Vesalius to Rabelais to Burton to Urquhart to Sterne. The third essay is the translational-medical humanities: the social neuroscience of hermeneutics in translation studies. And the conclusion is the translational medicine of the humanities: the dramatization of patient care and human wellness, sickness, and dying in Margaret Edson's Wit (1993).

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Why is it important?

The book is a transdisciplinary tour de force of literary studies, translation studies, hermeneutics, affective neuroscience, and the medical humanities.

Perspectives

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The book began as three separate papers, two written for journals, one for a conference. As I began to realize that (a) not one of them adequately covered its subject in 25 pages, but needed ideally 60-70 pages (which of course is a length no one will publish), and (b) by expanding the third to its proper length I could cover five other conferences that I would be speaking at during the autumn of 2016, I started trying to imagine a single umbrella topic that might justify publishing all three of them together as a monograph--and came up with "translational medicine" plus the "medical humanities," or "translational-medical humanities."

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