Peter Fifield

Bio

Peter Fifield is Lecturer in Modern Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. He is the author of Modernism and Physical Illness: Sick Literature (Oxford, 2020) and Late Modernist Style in Samuel Beckett and Emmanuel Levinas (Palgrave, 2013), as well as various chapters and articles on subjects including pain, syphilis, and teeth. He is course director for the MA Modern and Contemporary Literature, and the interdisciplinary MA Medical Humanities.

Contributions

Is Literary History Sick? Thoughts on a Declinist Trope

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The diagnostic stance assumes a certain status in the examined object. The doctor is not called to diagnose good health, only the nature of sickness. Insofar as literary critics adopt a diagnostic method of their own, they too begin with an often unstated assumption of literary “pathology”; implicitly, the text is understood to be problematic, whether aesthetically, morally, or ideologically. [1] Diagnostic critics, for all the nuance of their professional judgments, begin their work assuming...

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diagnosis literary object