Reading History in Motion

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.