Muscles, Movements, and Emotions: Moving Discourses/Static Genres

• In Event: Bodily Matters/ Bodies Matter: Unsettling Questions on the Discourse(s) on Health and Medicine

Abstract

Current research in rhetoric is concerned with embodiment, visual representation, and the relationship between medicine and discursive theories and practices. This paper addresses these concerns by examining seventeenth through nineteenth century discourse on and representations of a particular medical genre: studies of facial expressions. In these works, physicians, scientists, as well as rhetors attempted to make visible the links between facial expressions, muscles, and emotions, and, through these efforts, better understand the relationships between mind and body, reason and emotion. Examining these texts not only provides insight into them but also into contemporary technologies such as facial recognition. To those ends, my study focuses on the ways in which enthymemes operate in these texts, print linguistic, visual, and what I identify as gestural enthymemes. Beginning with John Bulwer’s Pathomyotomia, 1649, the first English work on the muscles and facials expressions, I trace a path through other works in this genre by James Parsons (1747), Thomas Brown (1820), Charles Bell (1806, 1844), Duchenne de Bologne (1848), and Charles Darwin (1872). I discover shifts in the content and form of the representations, shifts which reflect the influence of developing medical technologies involving photography. While the shifts initially destabilize this genre’s discourse, that instability resolves into a new way of conceptualizing and representing mind-body interactions: supported by emerging technologies, medical representations attempt to give life and movement to static discourse in their use of gestural enthymemes. This study examines a particular influence of medical technology on discursive practices, one which looks forward to current medical technology and practice, and shows how movements contribute to arguments.

Author

• Sara Newman, Kent State University