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Books by Christine Marks
“I am because you are” is a key passage in ‘What I Loved’ (2003), contemporary American writer Si... more “I am because you are” is a key passage in ‘What I Loved’ (2003), contemporary American writer Siri Hustvedt’s third novel, and a recurring motif throughout both her fictional and nonfictional work. This volume examines relational identity formation in her writing, especially the relationship between self and other in photography and painting, the transgression of corporeal boundaries in hysteria and anorexia, and the effects of losing attachment figures on personal identity. Hustvedt reveals identity as a complex product of conscious and unconscious interconnections within the social and biological environment. Through her unique investigations of these connections and the fragile boundaries between self and other, she enters new territory in the field of literary identity research. This volume further explores this territory through different discursive approaches, from philosophies of intersubjectivity to relational psychoanalysis.
Articles / Chapters by Christine Marks
Amerikastudien / American Studies, 2022
This article foregrounds pandemic fiction’s subversive and visionary potential through the exampl... more This article foregrounds pandemic fiction’s subversive and visionary potential through the example of Ling Ma’s dystopian pandemic novel "Severance" (2018). Emphasizing fiction’s capacity for symbolic intervention in a pandemic era, I argue that the text undermines tropes of nation-building through strategic employment of minor feelings, opacity, and spectral liminality. My analysis focuses on the Chinese American protagonist’s conflicted relationship with imagined communities forged in the conventional “outbreak narrative” (Wald) as her unhomely positionality places her at odds with unifying ideological responses to the catastrophic upheaval of the pandemic. At the intersection of pandemic and diasporic literature, Ma’s novel constitutes a narrative countersite that defies U.S.-American ideologies of linear progression, exceptionalism, and transparency, unsettling foundational tenets of national belonging. Drawing on Kandice Chuh’s transnational rearticulations of Asian American studies, Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings, Édouard Glissant’s notion of opacity, and theorizations of spectrality, I demonstrate how Ma’s novel offsets such American Enlightenment master narratives with counterimaginaries that reconstitute the world beyond teleological determinacy.
"Cranes on the Rise": Metaphors in Life Writing, 2018
Papers by Christine Marks
I first shared this assignment in LaGuardia’s Spring 2017 mini-seminar Introducing Your Disciplin... more I first shared this assignment in LaGuardia’s Spring 2017 mini-seminar Introducing Your Discipline in the First Year Seminar. I developed the assignment drawing on both Beyoncé’s 2016 Super Bowl halftime show and her music video “Formation” to initiate a discussion about how the Liberal Arts may inform our readings of popular culture images and performances. Through an analysis of content and form of Beyoncé’s musical performance and the video, students are invited to reflect on the ways in which a Liberal Arts education can contribute to a deeper understanding of the social issues addressed in the work. In our guided discussion, students frequently offer observations on historical and cultural contexts as well as power relations based on race and gender. We then explore the role of a liberal arts education (theatre and performance studies, history, political science, sociology, anthropology, music, etc.) in connecting and deciphering the various discourses that intersect in cultura...
Early Popular Visual Culture, 2017
Abstract This article publishes Erinnerungsblätter aus meinem Leben, the 1934 memoir of German eq... more Abstract This article publishes Erinnerungsblätter aus meinem Leben, the 1934 memoir of German equestrian Therese Renz (1859–1938), in English for the first time. Pages of Remembrance brings English language circus scholars into the memories and perspectives of a woman who toured Europe and the United States during the height of the Victorian circus. It provides poignant glimpses into the restlessness and rigorous training of her teen years, as well as her tenacity as a solo performer later in life. Additional archival evidence is analyzed to situate Renz’s 1905–1906 US tour with her ‘White Lady’ performance within the nation’s developing racial formation, arguing that it contributed to vaudeville’s white supremacist optics.
New Directions in Literature and Medicine Studies
Definitions of illness are constantly reframed and restructured, consolidated, and streamlined in... more Definitions of illness are constantly reframed and restructured, consolidated, and streamlined in the field of medicine. These types of reconceptualization occur at the intersection of evolving "objective" medical knowledge, the subjective experience of suffering, and the sociocultural contexts in which illnesses materialize. Emerging from the gaps between medico-scientific knowledge and the experience of the patient, illness narratives (including fictional and nonfictional representations of and by suffering individuals) highlight the narrative forces at work in illness and often promote an understanding of illness as culturally determined, constructed, and flexible. These alternative explanatory models are particularly relevant to an understanding of physiologically unexplainable illnesses, which have challenged health care practitioners and patients as they evade full objective description and demand a consideration of the subjective dimensions of illness. Indeed, the term illness itself encompasses the personal elements excluded by other terms such as disease or pathology, which delineate clinical assortments of symptoms detached from subjective experience (Couser, "Illness" 105). The uncertain etiology of medically invisible symptoms interferes with the goal of developing rigorous taxonomies of symptoms and clearly defined labels for various illnesses. This places what the American Psychiatric Association defines as "somatic symptom disorder" and other biologically invisible illnesses at the heart of a longstanding conflict over the privileging of physical evidence over psychological or invisible causes of illness.
“I am because you are” is a key passage in ‘What I Loved’ (2003), contemporary American writer Si... more “I am because you are” is a key passage in ‘What I Loved’ (2003), contemporary American writer Siri Hustvedt’s third novel, and a recurring motif throughout both her fictional and nonfictional work. This volume examines relational identity formation in her writing, especially the relationship between self and other in photography and painting, the transgression of corporeal boundaries in hysteria and anorexia, and the effects of losing attachment figures on personal identity. Hustvedt reveals identity as a complex product of conscious and unconscious interconnections within the social and biological environment. Through her unique investigations of these connections and the fragile boundaries between self and other, she enters new territory in the field of literary identity research. This volume further explores this territory through different discursive approaches, from philosophies of intersubjectivity to relational psychoanalysis.
to develop an understanding of the role of the liberal arts in moving towards a more complex perc... more to develop an understanding of the role of the liberal arts in moving towards a more complex perception of cultural differences across the world. They also reflect on their own biases and experiences during the first semester. Students write the first reflection after discussing the TED talk and the chapter in class at the beginning of the semester, and they return to some of the questions posed by these texts at the end of the first semester. This allows for a greater sense of continuity and coherence, as students reflect on their own learning experience over the course of a semester, deepening their thinking about important questions related to the role of the liberal arts in examining global issues from multiple perspectives. The main objectives of the assignment are
“I am because you are” is a key passage in ‘What I Loved’ (2003), contemporary American writer Si... more “I am because you are” is a key passage in ‘What I Loved’ (2003), contemporary American writer Siri Hustvedt’s third novel, and a recurring motif throughout both her fictional and nonfictional work. This volume examines relational identity formation in her writing, especially the relationship between self and other in photography and painting, the transgression of corporeal boundaries in hysteria and anorexia, and the effects of losing attachment figures on personal identity. Hustvedt reveals identity as a complex product of conscious and unconscious interconnections within the social and biological environment. Through her unique investigations of these connections and the fragile boundaries between self and other, she enters new territory in the field of literary identity research. This volume further explores this territory through different discursive approaches, from philosophies of intersubjectivity to relational psychoanalysis.
Amerikastudien / American Studies, 2022
This article foregrounds pandemic fiction’s subversive and visionary potential through the exampl... more This article foregrounds pandemic fiction’s subversive and visionary potential through the example of Ling Ma’s dystopian pandemic novel "Severance" (2018). Emphasizing fiction’s capacity for symbolic intervention in a pandemic era, I argue that the text undermines tropes of nation-building through strategic employment of minor feelings, opacity, and spectral liminality. My analysis focuses on the Chinese American protagonist’s conflicted relationship with imagined communities forged in the conventional “outbreak narrative” (Wald) as her unhomely positionality places her at odds with unifying ideological responses to the catastrophic upheaval of the pandemic. At the intersection of pandemic and diasporic literature, Ma’s novel constitutes a narrative countersite that defies U.S.-American ideologies of linear progression, exceptionalism, and transparency, unsettling foundational tenets of national belonging. Drawing on Kandice Chuh’s transnational rearticulations of Asian American studies, Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings, Édouard Glissant’s notion of opacity, and theorizations of spectrality, I demonstrate how Ma’s novel offsets such American Enlightenment master narratives with counterimaginaries that reconstitute the world beyond teleological determinacy.
"Cranes on the Rise": Metaphors in Life Writing, 2018
I first shared this assignment in LaGuardia’s Spring 2017 mini-seminar Introducing Your Disciplin... more I first shared this assignment in LaGuardia’s Spring 2017 mini-seminar Introducing Your Discipline in the First Year Seminar. I developed the assignment drawing on both Beyoncé’s 2016 Super Bowl halftime show and her music video “Formation” to initiate a discussion about how the Liberal Arts may inform our readings of popular culture images and performances. Through an analysis of content and form of Beyoncé’s musical performance and the video, students are invited to reflect on the ways in which a Liberal Arts education can contribute to a deeper understanding of the social issues addressed in the work. In our guided discussion, students frequently offer observations on historical and cultural contexts as well as power relations based on race and gender. We then explore the role of a liberal arts education (theatre and performance studies, history, political science, sociology, anthropology, music, etc.) in connecting and deciphering the various discourses that intersect in cultura...
Early Popular Visual Culture, 2017
Abstract This article publishes Erinnerungsblätter aus meinem Leben, the 1934 memoir of German eq... more Abstract This article publishes Erinnerungsblätter aus meinem Leben, the 1934 memoir of German equestrian Therese Renz (1859–1938), in English for the first time. Pages of Remembrance brings English language circus scholars into the memories and perspectives of a woman who toured Europe and the United States during the height of the Victorian circus. It provides poignant glimpses into the restlessness and rigorous training of her teen years, as well as her tenacity as a solo performer later in life. Additional archival evidence is analyzed to situate Renz’s 1905–1906 US tour with her ‘White Lady’ performance within the nation’s developing racial formation, arguing that it contributed to vaudeville’s white supremacist optics.
New Directions in Literature and Medicine Studies
Definitions of illness are constantly reframed and restructured, consolidated, and streamlined in... more Definitions of illness are constantly reframed and restructured, consolidated, and streamlined in the field of medicine. These types of reconceptualization occur at the intersection of evolving "objective" medical knowledge, the subjective experience of suffering, and the sociocultural contexts in which illnesses materialize. Emerging from the gaps between medico-scientific knowledge and the experience of the patient, illness narratives (including fictional and nonfictional representations of and by suffering individuals) highlight the narrative forces at work in illness and often promote an understanding of illness as culturally determined, constructed, and flexible. These alternative explanatory models are particularly relevant to an understanding of physiologically unexplainable illnesses, which have challenged health care practitioners and patients as they evade full objective description and demand a consideration of the subjective dimensions of illness. Indeed, the term illness itself encompasses the personal elements excluded by other terms such as disease or pathology, which delineate clinical assortments of symptoms detached from subjective experience (Couser, "Illness" 105). The uncertain etiology of medically invisible symptoms interferes with the goal of developing rigorous taxonomies of symptoms and clearly defined labels for various illnesses. This places what the American Psychiatric Association defines as "somatic symptom disorder" and other biologically invisible illnesses at the heart of a longstanding conflict over the privileging of physical evidence over psychological or invisible causes of illness.
“I am because you are” is a key passage in ‘What I Loved’ (2003), contemporary American writer Si... more “I am because you are” is a key passage in ‘What I Loved’ (2003), contemporary American writer Siri Hustvedt’s third novel, and a recurring motif throughout both her fictional and nonfictional work. This volume examines relational identity formation in her writing, especially the relationship between self and other in photography and painting, the transgression of corporeal boundaries in hysteria and anorexia, and the effects of losing attachment figures on personal identity. Hustvedt reveals identity as a complex product of conscious and unconscious interconnections within the social and biological environment. Through her unique investigations of these connections and the fragile boundaries between self and other, she enters new territory in the field of literary identity research. This volume further explores this territory through different discursive approaches, from philosophies of intersubjectivity to relational psychoanalysis.
to develop an understanding of the role of the liberal arts in moving towards a more complex perc... more to develop an understanding of the role of the liberal arts in moving towards a more complex perception of cultural differences across the world. They also reflect on their own biases and experiences during the first semester. Students write the first reflection after discussing the TED talk and the chapter in class at the beginning of the semester, and they return to some of the questions posed by these texts at the end of the first semester. This allows for a greater sense of continuity and coherence, as students reflect on their own learning experience over the course of a semester, deepening their thinking about important questions related to the role of the liberal arts in examining global issues from multiple perspectives. The main objectives of the assignment are