A wonderful Christmas gift this year, and this past year's centennial of the First World War, have brought my attention to a new facet of my current research on the relationship between textual media and human identity. I received Jorn Leonhard's major study: Pandora's Box: A History of the First World War (Cambridge MA: Belknap/Harvard, 2018). As part of my interest in the eventual emergence of human rights, its normative and literary contexts, I coincidentally found in my Feedly a post about bibliotherapy and the "healing book" at The Conversation (from the Open University) and it made me take a second look at this concept.
I am skeptical of the notion that reading can induce empathy in all cases, and I'm looking into the implications of a 2018 New Yorker article- one of many in recent years on the topic- that got me thinking about it for my research, but healing is a bit different. This interesting area of inquiry involved the history of "literary caregiving" as established by one Helen Mary Gaskell and her "war library" as the effects of trauma were being make overwhelmingly evident by 1918. There is much to read on this aspect of bibliotherapy and I will be looking into limited definitions and applications of it; I am reading one of the linked articles now (Hasam, Reading, Trauma, 2018).
As Leonhard points out, the British office class was faced with the embarrassment of the "shell shock" phenomenon and some terrible, even torture-based "treatments" were applied to soldiers.
(Leonhard, Pandora's Box at 510). He does not seem to detail this development of the war library and its healing intent, but as I am discovering this subtopic as yet another outgrowth of Robert Darnton's scholarship on reading, I am adding it to the mix in my exploration of self and text and the relationship between book and body, information and the manifestation of human consciousness, and the contributions of both to the rise of human rights.
I am skeptical of the notion that reading can induce empathy in all cases, and I'm looking into the implications of a 2018 New Yorker article- one of many in recent years on the topic- that got me thinking about it for my research, but healing is a bit different. This interesting area of inquiry involved the history of "literary caregiving" as established by one Helen Mary Gaskell and her "war library" as the effects of trauma were being make overwhelmingly evident by 1918. There is much to read on this aspect of bibliotherapy and I will be looking into limited definitions and applications of it; I am reading one of the linked articles now (Hasam, Reading, Trauma, 2018).
As Leonhard points out, the British office class was faced with the embarrassment of the "shell shock" phenomenon and some terrible, even torture-based "treatments" were applied to soldiers.
(Leonhard, Pandora's Box at 510). He does not seem to detail this development of the war library and its healing intent, but as I am discovering this subtopic as yet another outgrowth of Robert Darnton's scholarship on reading, I am adding it to the mix in my exploration of self and text and the relationship between book and body, information and the manifestation of human consciousness, and the contributions of both to the rise of human rights.
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