Month: November 2024

In the course of the research carried out as part of the Accessing Ophelia Project coordinated by Dr Emanuel Stelzer, the need emerged to study the character of Cassandra as a depiction of cognitive disability in Shakespeare’s receptions of Troilus and Cressida in a new project that expands its boundaries across narrative, dramatic, and poetic genres in English literature from the Middle Ages to the present days. The quantity and nature of the material found, as well as its complexity, hint at entirely original possibilities for development.  

The Cassandra Project investigates the representation of a particular case of prophetic furor as a cultural form of construction of female otherness on the ancient model of Cassandra, studying its mechanisms of exclusivity/inclusivity pertinent to various cultural discourses and their literary and theatrical re-elaborations. Cassandra is emblematic of femininity wounded by the violence of the divine masculine and who, although at the centre of the social and political life of Troy as a member of the royal family, undergoes a process of marginalisation: neither understood nor believed, she is at once princess and priestess, within and without the community to which she belongs. Her language speaks misunderstood and incomprehensible visions and, in the Aeschylus’ tragedy, is sum of tongues and glossolalia (Heirman 1975, Crippa 1990, Mazzoldi 2001). For Ratcliffe (1995), the inability of others to understand her raises questions of discourse articulation, as well as reception, of rhetoric and hermeneutics, invoking questions of ‘justice’ (73-4). In modern times, her otherness was identified as a psychological syndrome by Gaston Bachelard (1949), and was later studied, among others, by Melanie Klein (1963). The model referred to Cassandra identifies a constellation of emotional dysfunctions rubricated as typically female and referable to disorders such as hysteria (Layton Schapira 1988) and autism (Yergeau 2020).  

The project aims to explore the appropriation and reinterpretation of this feminine model in a selection of literary texts in the English language, from the earliest medieval attestations (Geoffrey Chaucer and Robert Henryson) and sixteenth-century Senecan translations to seventeenth-century receptions, including Richard Barnfield’s Cassandra (1595) and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (1602?; printed 1609). It will then go on to analyse examples of ‘modern Cassandras’ in the following centuries, with a particular focus on the Victorian period, up to the present day, examining a large corpus of texts including, significantly, female rewrites such as Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Fire Brand (1987), Barbara Wood’s The Prophetess (1996), and more recently Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls (2018) and Sharma Shields’ The Cassandra (2019) (cf. corpus). The research will also look at representations of Cassandras on stage, with a focus on Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (2005) and modern English representations of ancient Cassandras (see for example Macintosh et al. 2018). The research, although focused on a corpus of texts and performances in English, situates itself within a broader framework that requires a transdisciplinary and comparative approach.
Starting from the study of the irrational and prophetic furor in the ancient world with attention paid to the specific case of female furor and the Cassandra figure in its various ancient articulations (e.g. Dodds 1951; Guidorizzi 2009; Pillinger 2019), we will explore its receptions in the (early) modern, modern, and contemporary ages, with a particular focus on the construction of a psychological, and more specifically psychiatric, female model and the dialogical relationship this has with literary texts and theatre. Our approach is mainly comparative and encompasses Reception stances, including Translation, Adaptation, and Performance studies, Disability Studies, as well as Feminist and more broadly Cultural Studies.

Group leader: Silvia Bigliazzi  

Internal members:

• Petra Bjelica  
• Elisa Destro
• Valdo Jelcic 
• Cristiano Ragni  
• Beatrice Righetti  
• Isolde Schiffermuller 
• Emanuel Stelzer  
• Roberta Zanoni

External members:

• Anton Bierl (University of Basel)
• Francesca Cichetti (Università dell’Aquila) 
• Francesco Dall’Olio (independent scholar) 
• Giovanna Di Martino (University College London) 
• Amanda Douge (Glasgow University)
• Marco Duranti (independent scholar)  
• Alessandro Grilli (Università di Pisa) 
• Sotera Fornaro (Università della Campania – Vanvitelli) 
• Isabel Karremann (University of Zurich)  
• Chiara Lombardi (Università di Torino) 
• Justine McConnell (King’s College London) 
• Francesco Morosi (Università di Udine) 
• Anne Morvan (Nantes Université) 
• Emily Pillinger (King’s College London) 
• Eugenio Refini (New York University) 
• Anne Sophie Refskou (Aarhus University, Denmark)
• Elena Rossi Linguanti (Università di Pisa) 
• Olga Taxidou (Edinburgh University and NYU) 
• Sarantis Thanopulos (Società di psicolanalisi Italiana)
• Elena Theodorakopoulos (University of Birmingham)  
• Raffaella Viccei (Università Cattolica di Brescia)  
• Amelia Wyckoff  (Brown University)
• Antonio Ziosi (Università di Bologna)

Actions: WP 1.1 

References:

Bachelard, Gaston. 1949. Le Rationalisme appliqué. Paris: PUF.  
Crippa, Sabina. 1990. “Glossolalia. Il linguaggio di Cassandra”. Studi italiani di linguistica teorica applicata 19 (3): 487-508.  
Doherty, Lillian, 2002. Gender and the Interpretation of Classical Myth. London: Duckworth.  
Dodds, E.R. 1951. The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley: The University of California Press.  
Hardwick, Lorna, and Harrison, Stephen J., eds. 2013. Classics in the Modern World: A ‘Democratic Turn’? Oxford: Oxford University Press.  
Hardwick, Lorna, and Stray, Christopher. 2008. A Companion to Classical Receptions. Oxford: Blackwell.   
Harrison, Stephen J., ed. 2009. Living Classics: Greece and Rome in Contemporary Poetry in English. Oxford: Oxford. University Press.  
Heirman, L.J. 1975. “Kassandra’s glossolalia”. Mnemosyne 28 (3): 257-67.  
Guidorizzi, Giulio. 2009. Ai confine dell’anima. Milano: Raffaello Cortina Editore.  
Yergeau, Melanie. 2020. “Cassandra Isn’t Doing the Robot: on Risky Rhetorics and Contagious Autism”. Rhetoric Society Quarterly 50 (3): 2012-21.  
Klein, Melanie. 1963. “Some Reflections on The Oresteia”. In Klein, Melanie. Envy and Gratitude. And Other Works, 1946-1963, 275-299. London: Vintage.    
Layton Schapira, Laurie. 1988. The Cassandra Complex. Living with Disbelief: a Modern Perspective on Hysteria. Toronto: Inner City Books.  
Macintosh, Fiona, Justine McConnell, Stephen Harrison, and Claire Kenward, eds. 2018. Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.   
Macintosh, Fiona, Pantelis Michelakis, Edith Hall, and Oliver Taplin, eds. 2005. Agamemnon in Performance 458 BC to ad 2004. Oxford: Oxford University Press.   
Martindale, Charles, and Richard F. Thomas. 2006. Classics and the Use of Reception. Oxford: Blackwell.  
Mazzoldi, Sabina. 2001. Cassandra, la vergine e l’indovina. Identità di un personaggio da Omero all’Ellenismo. Pisa – Roma: Istituti editoriali e poligrafici internazionali.  
Pillinger, Emily. 2019. Cassandra and the Poetics of Prophecy in Greek and Latin Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  
Ratcliffe, Krista. 1995. “Listening to Cassandra: A Materialist-Feminist Exposé of the Necessary Relations between Rhetoric and Hermeneutics.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 28 (2): 63–77.  
Shakespeare, William. 2005. Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare in production series). Edited by Frances A. Shirley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  
Theodorakopoulos, Elena ed. 2012. Translation, Transgression, Transformation: Contemporary Women Authors and Classical Reception, special issue of Classical Receptions Journal 4 (2).

The project endeavours to contribute to research and practice that increase our capacity for literature’s more conscious application to mitigating social challenges and promoting social inclusion. It aims to add a further perspective to understanding if and how literary reading can support disadvantaged sectors of society, leading to improved life satisfaction and wellbeing, and ultimately reducing health and happiness inequalities. Research shows that wellbeing is influenced by various interconnected factors, including those often dictated by our choices, such as education, employment, housing, and health. Our relationships and the media, our augmented environment, have a big impact on our identity, beliefs and attitudes – and hence such life choices. Since media industries often propel insecurity, social division, consumerism and addictive behaviours and one’s environment may imbed limiting beliefs and conformism, mitigating such disempowering influences is a critical step. 

Empirical studies are exploring health, wellbeing and psychological effects of literature and show that literary reading can stimulate modifications in worldview, mentalising ability (Theory of Mind) and self-understanding, helping create an openness to self-alteration and personality trait modification. This may suggest literature’s potential to foster also empowerment which can be defined as an expansion of freedom of choice and action by increasing one’s authority over decisions that affect one’s life. 

The project seeks to arrive at a set of five literary works of prose and five meaningful prose excerpts that may help enhance readers’ perception of disempowering influences in their environment and foster empowerment to help counter their effects. It also aims to develop an interdisciplinary methodological tool to measure for such effects and test it empirically on diverse groups of readers. 

Group leaders: Chiara Battisti and Massimo Salgaro

Internal members:

• Anja Meyer 

External members:

• Krystyna Wieszczek 

Actions: WP 1.1; WP 1.3 

References:

Billington, Josie. 2020. Is Literature Healthy?. Oxford UP. 
Kuiken, Don et al. 2004. ‘Locating Self-Modifying Feelings Within Literary Reading’. In Discourse Processes 38 (2), 267-86.  
Scientific Study of Literature (SSOL) 6 (1). 2016. 
Usherwood, Bob, and Jackie Toyne. 2002. ‘Value and Impact of Reading Imaginative Literature’, Librarianship and Information Science 34 (1). 

The research project connects the critical approaches of disability studies and health humanities and focuses on the narrative, cultural and discursive aspect of the concept of disability. In particular the project will develop along two main lines of investigation:

1. Alzheimer’s and cognitive disability narratives,
2. Dis-abiliy narratives in children’s and young adult’s narratives. 

Alzheimer’s and cognitive disability’s narratives (Chiara Battisti): the proposal aims to investigate whether there are any traces of early manifestations of Alzheimer’s and other cognitive disabilities in authors’ writing, by means of a comparative textual analysis of works written before, and during/after diagnosis. The proposal also aims to determine whether the detected changes in style are consistent with age-related changes or Alzheimer’s symptomatology. Some studies have shown that early manifestations of Alzheimer’s can be detected through changes in an individual’s speech and writing. These changes can include a decrease in vocabulary size, a reduction in grammatical complexity, and a decline in the coherence and clarity of the individual’s writing. 

Dis-ability narratives in children’s and young adult’s narratives (Sidia Fiorato): the project aims at investigating the representation and conception of disability in literary and cultural texts, both from a physical/medical and psychilogical/social perspective, in connection with the articulation of identity of the protagonists and readers. The research will focus on the Victorian period, in relation with the codification of childhood as a distinct life phase and the development of child psychology and psychiatry, and the contemporary period, in particular through the re-reading of fairy tales as a metaphor for the articulation of ableness and dis-abled identities, through the analysis of the protaginists and the communication with young readers. The research will be based on a qualitative research design, specifically, comparative textual analysis, integrated with linguistic and stylometrics tools, cultural and medical theories.  

Group leaders: Chiara Battisti and Sidia Fiorato

Internal members:

• Anja Meyer (assegnista Università di Verona) 

Actions: WP 1.1  

References:

Battisti C. (2018) “Am I Still Alice?”: The Quest for “a Sense of Self” and Alzheimer’s Disease in Still Alice by Lisa Genova” in Susan Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau, The Wounded Hero in Contemporary Fiction. A Paradoxical Quest, Routledge.  
Said, E. (2006) On Late Style, New York: Vintage Book. 
Elizabeth A. Wheeler, “Disability”, in A Companion to Children’s Literature, ed. Karen Coats et al, New York: Blackwell, 2022 
Donna Sayers Adomat, “Exploring Issues of Disability in Children’s Literature Discussions”, Disability Studies Quarterly 34.3 (2014) 

This project aims to develop an innovative research pathway to identify a corpus of literary texts that can be used in medical/healthcare training courses to develop empathy and clinical acumen among medical students and medical and healthcare staff. Narrative Medicine emphasises the importance of understanding the patient’s narrative and of developing empathy as a key component of effective medical care. The critical literature on the use of literary texts in medical training courses is promising in this regard. However, the identification of effective literary texts is still lacking. This project will therefore employ a qualitative research approach- using a combination of content analysis and focus group discussions- to identify such a corpus of texts North American and British literature. The study will begin by identifying a list of potential literary texts-excerpts from novels, short stories, poems, graphic novels, and films-based on their relevance to medical themes and their potential to foster the aforementioned empathy and clinical acumen. The identified literary texts will be subjected to content analysis to evaluate their effectiveness in meeting the objectives of the study.

The results of the content analysis will be used to select the final corpus of literary texts. Focus group discussions will be conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the identified literary texts. 

The expected outcome of this research will contribute to the growing literature on Narrative Medicine and Medical Humanities, highlighting the importance of incorporating humanistic approaches in medical training and practice.  

Group leader: Chiara Battisti and Sidia Fiorato

Internal members:

• Anja Meyer (assegnista Università di Verona)

External members:

• Emma Aminat Badmus (PhD at Universita’ di Modena) 
• Beatrice Melodia Festa (prof.ssa a contratto Università di Verona) 

Actions: WP 1.1, WP 1.2  

References:

Bleakley, A. (2015). Medical Humanities and Medical Education: How the Medical Humanities.Can Shape Better Doctors. London: Routledge. 
Charon, R. Narrative Medicine. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Print.Charon, R., & DasGupta, S. (2011). Narrative medicine, or a sense of story, Literature and Medicine, 29(2), vii–xiii. doi: 10.1353/lm.2011.0329 
Kemp, S. J., & Day, G. (2014). “Teaching medical humanities in the digital world: affordances of technology-enhanced learning.” Medical Humanities, 40. 
Kerasidou, A., Horn, R. “Making space for empathy: supporting doctors in the emotional labour of clinical care” BMC Med Ethics 17, 8 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12910-016-0091-7