Oh, and yes the course is very scary. I’m struggling to read everything that’s required of me (which can’t always be made relevant to even the essay I have to write for that particular course) and do the Ph.D. at the same time. I suppose that’s the price you have to pay to grow a comprehensive knowledge. It’s just a little bit too intensive, though. Still, as I think I told you, I’ve never been happier!

I hope your new module goes well!

All my best,
Paul.

This is very interesting – your course sounds brilliant and scary at the same time, which is, I’m sure, the way it’s supposed to be. You’ve clearly found lots of stuff already on teeth and are off to a flying start. I’ve been reading a book called The Body: A Reader, ed. by Miriam Fraser and Monica Greco (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), and specifically a newly translated essay in it, Georges Canguilhem’s ‘Monstrosity and the Monstrous’, for my new module starting next week: Monstrous Bodies. You might be interested in bits of this, such as:

In 1826 at Auteil, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire had resumed old artificial incubation experiments first tried in Egypt, imitating the techniques used in the famous “chicken ovens”. [ie artificial incubators] The aim of the experiments was to bring about embryonic anomalies. In 1829, drawing a lesson from this research as it related to the question posed by Lamarck’s thesis on the modifications of specific animal types, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire wrote: “I was trying to induce organization down some unusual paths.” Doubtless this decision, inasmuch as it led to operating on bird’s eggs, did not have any grandiose unconscious motivation behind it. But can we say the same of Réamur when, after having recounted at length what he termed the armours of a chicken and a rabbit, he expressed his disappointment that such a bizarre union had not procured for him “fur-covered chickens of feathered rabbits”? What shall we say on the day that we learn that experiments in teratogeny [def. the formation of monsters] have been carried out on humans? […] We are well aware of the distance that lies between biologists creating their object for themselves and those who manufacture human monsters to serve as fairground attractions, such as Victor Hugo described in L’Homme qui rit [The Man Who Laughs]. We must wish for such a distance to be preserved, but we cannot assert that it will be.’

I thought I might give this to the students and see what they make of it… It’ll work well with Frankenstein, one of the texts on the module.

Best,

Sharon