Dear all,
we have some news. The first is that the meeting was postponed to April 20, immediately after Easter. So far
Raoul has offered to make a short speech (short I will tell you the topic, attenente the body anyway), and a graduate student in Siena, Elena Cappellini, sent me this email with your proposal for action, which seems very interesting around you at once.
A warm greeting, we feel very soon
Dear James,
I write now and cast a few ideas to avoid the risk, tomorrow, to fall into the usual laziness and pedantry that I nailed to endless and inconclusive musings.
I develop the theme of the body-machine-tools-men in the modern hospital, studying the impact of new medical technologies on the imaginary of artists and writers. If I have to think at the end of April, the title could be: Pictures of an invisible body. The X-ray imagery in the twentieth century.
to its ability to show the invisible, believe the X-ray is the only picture in which we do not recognize at all: an inner body, fragmented and deadly, before dark and unknown, now illuminated by the rays, is faced for all to see. Among the first radiograph of a left hand (1896) and the emergence of radiology as a set of beliefs and practices for medical use (about two decades later), an intermediate area between science and parascience, the new science of the interior is confused with photo, with the occult, with contemporary advances in psychology and the birth of psychoanalysis. Symptomatic of a deeper reality of appearance, radiology is not only subject of interest and technical-industrial progress, but it interacts with world views and visions of reality, transpositions and symbolic processing by artists and writers.
transposed from the first Futurist and Cubist, its ability to combine the matter and energy, and find the structures below the forms, radiology never seems to have stopped operating on the imaginary literary. I think immediately to the sanatorium and the photographs inside the Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, the X-rays and the shock of Antonin Artaud during his internment at the psychiatric hospital Rodez, until recently in the building of flesh: a real autobiography that Valentina Magrelli builds through the story of illness, small disturbances, medical surgery and suffered from childhood to today, where the sheets can be collected as in an album of pictures. Chasing the personal or fictional experience of these authors, the reason I seem to fit also in radiological more general issues of illness, hospitalization, etc..
I do not have a bibliography, these are only suggestions derived from Foucault and the course in the History of Medicine Cosmacini and by reading some authors as part of my research. I do not know if the issue could come back to your project, but if so I would be happy to accept your proposal. Let me know.
you soon, Elena
