Main description:

Hysteria is alive and well in our present time and is apparently spreading contagiously: especially the second decade of the twenty-first century has displayed an ever-increasing interest in the term. A quick Google search opens the gates to sheer endless swathes of discussions on hysteria, covering almost every aspect of public discourses. The arts-as it is often in such cases-seem conspicuously involved in and engaged with this hysterical discourse. Surprisingly, while the strong academic interest in hysteria throughout the twentieth century and most prominently at the turn of the century is well known and much discussed, the study of how these discourses have continued well into twenty-first-century art practices, is largely pressing on a blind spot. It is the aim of this volume to illustrate how hysteria was already well established within the arts alongside and at times even separately from the much-covered medical studies, and reveal how those current artistic practices very much continue a century spanning cross-fertilization between hysteria and the arts.

Contents:

Introduction: Searching for Methods in this Madness

L'arc de cercle, or the Movement of Modernism (1620-2020)

Hysterias in Pictures

From "Private Theatres Onstage" to Anti-Hysterical Performances: Reclaiming the Feminist Interest in Hysterical Performances Since the 1990s

State of Anxiety: Hysterical Studies for Reproduction Struggles

Hysteria: Turning a Diagnosis into a Call

To Arc, and Other Studies on Hysterical Gesturing

The Other Self of the Imagination: Cindy Sherman's Hysterical Performance

Hysterical Representation in the Art of Mary Sibande

A Storm in a Teacup, and Other Minor Melodramas: Narratives of Containment and Excess in Cultured Colonies/Colonial Cultures

Making Ghosts Heard

Hysterical Aesthetics in Contemporary Performance: Theater, Dance, Voice

H. Y. S. T. et al., on Archiving Hysteria's Past in the Present

Male Hysteria and the Archive: An Auto-Ethnographic Reflection

Notes on Hysteria in and as Arts-Based Research: a Case Study

Dora with Medusa: Is Hysterical Writing a Subversive Revolution?

Lecture Performance: On Truth and its Relation to the Cellar Regions of the Body

Via Telefaune, a Phone Call with Helene Cixous