Abstract: This article rethinks the relationship between religious experience and narrative form in Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative (1789). It argues that Equiano's Methodist rebirth compensates for an autobiographical problem immanent to his retelling of his enslavement and freedom—the problem of how to account for his present identity through past actions that no longer appear to have produced it. Through conversion, Equiano develops a faculty of divine hindsight that allows him to narrate his unconverted actions as irrelevant to his final state, empowering him to enter the antislavery movement through a form of political agency outside of the demand for total self-mastery.
Kevis Goodman's Pathologies of Motion: Historical Thinking in Medicine, Aesthetics, and Poetics approaches environmental medicine, aesthetic philosophy, and Romantic poetics as allied, overlapping, though not identical, bodies of knowledge engaged in apprehending the relationship between the movement of people and the corresponding physiological motions in their bodies. This introduction highlights the book's contribution to our understanding of the connection between people and place, and, more broadly, the affective dimensions of mobility in the Romantic era and
Kevis Goodman's Pathologies of Motion shows how far back English conversations about aesthetics reach, arising not in discussions of the arts, but through a medical tradition later picked up by those writing about taste. In the shift from the line of taste to the line of pa-thology, reading, sometimes prescribed as a cure for various ailments, becomes something other than therapeutic. It is instead keyed to imbalance and disturbance in what William Wordsworth might call an "underthirst" or counter-tradition. And this in turn takes us to the vast historical transformations taking place in the backdrop of Goodman's study: we can now begin to think about how both disease and poetry register an environmental imbalance at a moment when that environment is changing dramatically in response to forced movement related to slavery, global political revolutions, and the human displacement and demographic shifts that ensued.
This essay places the book Pathologies of Motion: Historical Thinking in Medicine, Aesthetics, and Poetics in conversation with the intellectual history of the eighteenth-century Black Atlantic as well as theories of race and aesthetics within Black Studies. It suggests that the book offers a way to reassess histories of healing, mobility, and aesthetic production by centering the African diaspora and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The essay thus reframes eighteenth-century pathologies of motion as racialized and sensorial responses to the ruptures of enslavement.
Abstract: Kevis Goodman's Pathologies of Motion traces the intertwined trajectory of medical and literary thinking in the eighteenth century through the development of the fields of pathology and aesthetics. Disorders and dislocations of motion serve as case studies for subsequent effects on bodies and perceptions. The disciplinary coupling of pathology and poetics reveals fissures in the conceived body: inside/outside, voluntary/involuntary and continuous/discontinuous. Goodman presents symptomatic reading as a shared interpretive practice critical to medicine and rhetoric, one that allows scholars and researchers to resolve these paired oppositions. This approach presents an opportunity for aligning poetics and aesthetic projects with medical and scientific practices and pedagogy.
