By Erin M. Goss
ISBN-10: 1611483948
ISBN-13: 9781611483949
Revealing our bodies turns to the eighteenth century to invite a query with carrying on with relevance: what different types of wisdom our figuring out of our personal our bodies? targeting the strain among particularity and generality that inheres in highbrow discourse concerning the physique, Revealing our bodies explores the disconnection among the physique understood as a basic shape to be had to wisdom and the physique skilled as really one's personal. Erin Goss locates this department in modern physically shows, comparable to Gunther von Hagens' physique Worlds, and in eighteenth-century anatomical discourse. Her readings of the corporeal aesthetics of Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry, William Blake's cosmological depiction of the body's foundation in such works because the [First] publication of Urizen, and Mary Tighe's mirrored image at the relation among love and the soul in Psyche; or, The Legend of affection show that the belief of the physique that grounds wisdom in an figuring out of anatomy emerges no longer as truth yet as fiction. finally, Revealing our bodies describes how thinkers within the eighteenth and 19th centuries and physically exhibitions within the 20th and twenty-first name upon allegorized figurations of the physique to hide the absence of the other to be had skill to appreciate that that is uniquely our personal: our lifestyles as our bodies on the planet.
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Additional info for Revealing Bodies: Anatomy, Allegory, and the Grounds of Knowledge in the Long Eighteenth Century
Sample text
The body offered as evidence of universal experience aims to negate or dispel the differences among bodies precisely because such differences undermine the epistemological certainty for which empirical assertions of knowledge aim. This book explores the tension between particularity and generality that emerges within the consideration of the body in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While political questions will remain more implicit than explicit in the chapters that follow, the relationship traced by both Poovey and Rovee between an individual body and a larger, generalized entity in which that body can become meaningful is illustrative of the problem I describe.
In the insistence that spectators should recognize themselves as equivalent to one another in their possession of this universal or general form, they erase particularity as irrelevant to bodily experience, calling upon their viewers to recognize themselves as members of a crowd or a social body that comprises all human beings. If knowledge depends on bodily experience, both contemporary and historical exhibits suggest, then knowledge can also be considered to be shared and in common. As I will illustrate in the following chapter on Edmund Burke, eighteenth-century conceptions of knowledge struggle with the threat of the particularity of experience.
In revealing the body as subject to experience that cannot be represented in language and that can only be approximated by the metaphors with which we describe it (as “burning,” or “shooting,” for example), pain exposes the degree to which knowledge of the body relies upon figurative approximation not only in the metaphoric description of bodily sensation but also in the very idea of the body that is described. The body occupies language and the world of others as a generalized form. However, the body in pain reveals the degree to which the generalized form that allows for the body’s representation is itself a fiction.