“Uncertain Disease”: Nostalgia, Pathologies of Motion, Practices of Reading

Abstract

“Uncertain Disease”: Nostalgia, Pathologies of Motion, Practices of Reading Kevis Goodman (bio) Kevis Goodman University of California, Berkeley Kevis Goodman Kevis Goodman is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History, published by Cambridge UP. Her articles and reviews have appeared in ELH, the South Atlantic Quarterly, SiR, the European Romantic Review, and elsewhere. Her contribution to this issue belongs to a book project, in progress, on the exchanges and relays between eighteenth-century medicine and Romantic aesthetics, as both negotiate the conditions of modern mobility. Footnotes 1. (Durham: Duke UP, 1999) 21, xvii. 2. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie, The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976) 185. There have recently been, of course, quite a number of discussions of the eighteenth-century idea(s) of “system.” See Clifford Siskin, “1798: the Year of the System,” in 1798: The Year of the Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. Cronin (New York: St. Martin’s P, 1998); Siskin, “Novels and Systems,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 34 (2001): 202–15; Miranda Burgess, British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000); and Robert Mitchell, Sympathy and the State in the Romantic Era: Systems, State Finance, and the Shadows of Futurity (New York: Routledge, 2007). I have found very helpful Mitchell’s observation that “periods of crisis are also moments in which systems become phenomenologically available–it is not when systems function well, but rather when they do not that they become visible as systems–and, as a consequence, moments in which the potential for radically different forms of social systems become palpable” (19). For a discussion of Cullen’s theory and practice of nosology, see R. E. Kendall, “William Cullen’s Synopsis Nosologiae Methodicae,” in William Cullen and the Eighteenth Century Medical World, ed. A Doig et. al. (Edinburgh; Edinburgh UP, 1993) 216–33. 3. William Cullen, Nosology; or, a systematic arrangement of diseases…, third edition (Edinburgh, 1800) 162–64. If family resemblance seems less than obvious to us, we might note that it was also not unique. Giving his lectures on anthropology at Königsberg at roughly the same time, and offering instances of “deception due to the strength of the imagination,” Kant lists “the homesickness of the Swiss” right next to “the sight of others enjoying loathsome things (e.g., when the Tungese rhythmically suck out and swallow the mucus from their children’s noses) [which] induces the spectator to vomit.” “Patria ubi bene,” Kant added, by way of explanation for this startling breach of decorum (Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, ed. Robert Louden, trans. Manfred Kuehn [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006] 71–72). 4. Cullen, Nosology 162. 5. Linda Hutcheon, “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern,” Methods for the Study of Literature as Cultural Memory, ed. Raymond Vervliet and Annemarie Estor (Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000) 195; Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke UP, 1993) 23; see also 145. 6. For overviews of this process of waxing and waning, see Jean Starobinski’s wonderful essay, “The Idea of Nostalgia,” Diogenes 54 (1966): 81–103; also George Rosen, “Nostalgia: A ‘Forgotten’ Psychological Disorder,” Clio Medica 10 (1975): 29–52, and Michael Roth, “Dying of the Past: Medical Studies of Nostalgia in Nineteenth-Century France,” History and Memory 3 (1991): 5–29. 7. Nicholas Dames, Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810–1870 (New York: Oxford UP, 2001) 36, 24 and 20–75 more generally. Dames lists five interrelated elements of this “newer nostalgic system”: “[1] pleasure; [2] temporal rather than spatial orientation; [3] disconnection [i.e., from the past]; [4] naming or categorizing; [5] communal dissemination” (35). 8. Linda Austin, Nostalgia in Transition, 1780–1917 (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2007) 2, 14. 9. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic, 2001) xviii, xvi, and 49–50. 10. Ian Hacking, Mad Travelers: Reflections of (he Reality of Transient Mental Illness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP: 2002...

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