Apprehensions of a Canon: Literature and Medicine 2013–2022

Apprehensions of a Canon:Literature and Medicine 2013–2022 Anna Fenton-Hathaway (bio) Space, through translation, connects, whereas time, through the canon, divides. —Marta Arnaldi, early draft of "Illness as a Foreign Tongue" The claim in the epigraph is meant to be experienced by readers in a certain mood. Lyrical and nervy, it withholds direct objects (connects whom? divides what?) to preserve its rhythm, brief but hypnotic; its function is not to prove but to propose. When I first approached the sentence, I was not in this mood. I was copy-editing an early draft of the essay by Marta Arnaldi that appears in this issue of the journal, and I read it like a fact-checker: "Has this been shown in this essay? Or by [Julia] Kristeva? I know it was asserted on p. 5, but it feels like such a big claim (!). Wouldn't the canon-makers say that the canon connects us through time?" In response, the author gamely adjusted the second half of her sentence, adding a reference to a longer publication where she expands this meditation on space, translation, connection, time, division, and the canon. Yet the original version—time, through the canon, divides—has stuck with me. Reflecting on a near-decade with Literature and Medicine, I find that both its terms and its slightly disorienting effect help me ask genuine questions about the work we've published in that time. Is a canon visible in those twenty issues, or in the forty total volumes of Literature and Medicine? Would such a canon be a critical one—a set of models for looking at any text or structure—or a creative one—a set of fiction and nonfiction texts available to be analyzed or celebrated by various methods, according to evolving motivations? And if there is a canon here, or even a series of canons, what are their effects, and on whom? [End Page 235] Data collected by Project Muse, the online subscription-based platform where Literature and Medicine appears, may offer some preliminary answers. For three months in 2020 Muse made its content entirely open access, in part to ensure existing subscribers could continue their research when their schools and libraries were in lockdown. Over this period our journal's hits and downloads increased fourfold. Muse's usage report also includes an "institutions tab" indicating where those hits and downloads come from. During the open-access period, the top institution by far (separated from the second-place Auckland University of Technology by more than 65,000 hits) was "no institution." It is of course likely that thousands of these "no institution" readers were affiliated scholars accessing the platform from home, thus realizing Project Muse's main goal. But the rise in unaffiliated readership is too steep to consist solely of homebound North American professors. (Of the top twenty institutions listed after Auckland, eight are indeed in the US, with four in the UK and four more in Canada—but universities from the Netherlands, Sweden, and Brazil are also listed.) Across more spaces, then, a pandemic attracted more readers to Literature and Medicine. In this case, the canon connected: the 2018 theme issue on "Chemistry, Disability, and Frankenstein" was our most accessed issue, featuring history of science and disability studies approaches to Mary Shelley's 200-year-old novel. Other essays—on the 1918 influenza pandemic, on metaphors for Alzheimer's disease, on Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and on Virginia Woolf's On Being Ill—also appear among the top twenty articles for this period; why thousands of new readers chose these essays is clear in some cases, less so in others. But the interest in Frankenstein validates the terms Arnaldi has provided us, if not her equation. Time, so far, has not managed to distance Frankenstein's central questions—about grief, innovation, community, prejudice, and responsibility—from an ever-changing cast of contemporary issues. What time has made possible, however, is an increasing number of translations of the novel, into languages from Arabic, Bengali, and Chinese to Malay.1 These translations, and the many adaptations of Frankenstein into various media, have in turn created more opportunities for...