You are invited to participate in the online panel
“Creativity and Illness”
organized by
the Centre for Creativity Research
(Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Faculty of Polish Studies)
9 September, 6 p. m. Warsaw time / 5 p. m. London time (UTC + 2 hours)
Join Zoom Meeting
You are invited to participate in the online panel
“Creativity and Illness”
organized by
the Centre for Creativity Research
(Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Faculty of Polish Studies)
9 September, 6 p. m. Warsaw time / 5 p. m. London time (UTC + 2 hours)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/2187583567?pwd=Rmh3NGZxRVc0eHpqOU5JbHgxSXdhZz09
Meeting ID: 218 758 3567
Our program:
1. “Creativity, Illness and Health: Case Studies from English Literature”, talk by Wim Van Mierlo (Loughborough University)
Is there a language of illness? Literary history largely separates the ‘man’ from the work. Biography is context; the work stands on its own. While literary historians accept a correlation between the two, the work is usually not sees as determined by the life. Even when it comes to chronic illness the work is not usually presented as having impacted the creative process. Using some well-known cases from English literature – John Keats’s tuberculosis and Virginia Woolf’s mental illness among others – this paper will probe how illness may affect the writing by looking more closely how these writers experienced and reflected on their afflictions in letters, diaries, and memoirs. I will argue that, in the end, creativity and illness do intersect. However, we need to develop a more refined language of illness to understand the precise nature of this correlation.
2. Discussion
3. “Creative Aphasia”, talk by Dirk Van Hulle (University of Oxford)
Not being able to speak may be a curse or a blessing for a writer. On the one hand, it is an obstacle to expression with words; on the other hand, if one cannot speak, one can always write instead. Towards the end of his life, the Irish author Samuel Beckett temporarily suffered from aphasia as a consequence of a fall in his kitchen. The only text he wrote after this incident is his last work, ‘comment dire’ / ‘what is the word’. It thematizes a form of ‘aphasia’ that does not regard writing as a solution to the inability to speak, but that profoundly questions the ability to express one’s thoughts by means of words. This lecture examines how Beckett’s brief spell of aphasia inspired him to write a short masterpiece that concisely summarizes a poetics of ‘pejorism’ which he had been working on for almost fifty years.
4. Discussion
5. Centre for Creativity Research: our plans, ideas, and forthcoming events.
Dr. hab. Mateusz Antoniuk
Head of the Centre