Abstract: Kevis Goodman's Pathologies of Motion shows how far back English conversations about aesthetics reach, arising not in discussions of the arts, but through a medical tradition later picked up by those writing about taste. In the shift from the line of taste to the line of pathology, reading, sometimes prescribed as a cure for various ailments, becomes something other than therapeutic. It is instead keyed to imbalance and disturbance in what William Wordsworth might call an "underthirst" or counter-tradition. And this in turn takes us to the vast historical transformations taking place in the backdrop of Goodman's study: we can now begin to think about how both disease and poetry register an environmental imbalance at a moment when that environment is changing dramatically in response to forced movement related to slavery, global political revolutions, and the human displacement and demographic shifts that ensued.
Jonathan Sachs (Sun,) studied this question.