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CFP: Food and Drink, Drugs and Medicine: Gothic Images of Ingestion from 19th century Fin de Siècle to Early 21st Century (Literature and Film)(Dated Added: 05 Jan 2012)

SEMINAR 58.  Food and Drink, Drugs and Medicine: Gothic Images of Ingestion from 19th century Fin de Siècle to Early 21st Century (Literature and Film)

In 19th-century culture the idea of ingesting substances became a pivot of many anxieties which were produced by specific problems: food adulteration, drunkenness, widespread consumption of opium, the large-scale production of medicines fostered by a competitive market. All these phenomena laid stress on the danger of consuming and ingesting substances that instead of providing nutrition (or healing) corrupted the body. These dangers were fictionalised by late-Victorian novelists who used Gothic paraphernalia to turn a positive image into a threatening one. Authors such as Stevenson, Machen, Wilde etc. make use of food and poison. The vampire motif is pregnant with references to drugs and blood is seen as a perverse source of nourishment. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries these motifs have been exploited in literary fiction and on screen. In "gothic melodramas" poison is a major motif and drug addiction is recurrent in neo-Victorian literature and cinema. The aim of this seminar is to explore the various modes of representation of food and drugs and see how they can be related at various stages of cultural history to such issues as manipulation, the human paradigm, otherness and gender relationships. Kristeva's concept of "abjection" and Derrida's theory (among others) may be useful in that respect.

Gilles Menegaldo (University of Poitiers, FR) 
gilles.menegaldo@univ-poitiers.fr 
Mariaconcetta Costantini (Università G. d'Annunzio, IT) 
m.costantini@unich.it 
mc_costantini@hotmail.com

Procedure for submitting paper proposals:

Colleagues wishing to participate in the Seminar are invited to submit a 200-word abstract of their proposed paper directly to the convenors of the Seminar before 31st  January 2012. The convenors will notify the participants of acceptance of their proposals by 29th  February 2012.

Oral presentations will last 15 minutes, with a maximum of 5 papers in each two-hour seminar session, to allow plenty of time for discussion between speakers and with the audience.

All the information concerning the ESSE-11 Conference in Istanbul can be found on the Conference website http://www.esse2012.org