Pathologies of Motion: Historical Thinking in Medicine, Aesthetics, and Poetics

The genitive construction of Kevis Goodman's title, Pathologies of Motion: Historical Thinking in Medicine, Aesthetics, and Poetics, has three senses: the pathological motions coursing through disturbed nervous systems; the dislocations and disruptions of migration, rural depopulation, colonial expansion, and the forced transportation of slaves; and the stuttering, eddying motions of irregular verse. If only the second of these motions seems properly historical, Goodman argues that nervous and reading motions register and reflect history as presence, or what she called in her earlier Georgic Modernity “that immanent, collective perception of any moment as a seething mix of unsettled elements” (Goodman 2004: 3). Pathologies of Motion continues the project of that earlier book, which argued that eighteenth-century georgic poetry, far from burying history in nature, churns and turns up historical meaning. The new book's archive—writings from eighteenth-century medicine's branch of “medical semiotics,” or pathology—generates arguments and propositions at an even...