Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts / Progress in Mathematics (PDF)

"I recommend this book warmly to all readers interested in the current state of scholarship on hysteria, art, and politics. It is an exciting and timely book with a wonderful range of work, with considerable erudition, innovative theory and artwork."

-Professor Valerie Walkerdine, Cardiff University, UK

Hysteria is alive and well in our present time and is apparently spreading contagiously: in particular, the second decade of the twenty-first century has shown an increased interest in the term. A quick web search opens the gates to endless swathes of discussions on hysteria, covering almost every aspect of public discourse. The arts 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 into twenty-first-centuryart practices addresses what is effectively an academic 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 much-covered medical studies, and reveal how current artistic practices continue a century spanning cross-fertilization between hysteria and the arts.

Johanna Braun is an artist, scholar, curator, and Principle Investigator of the postdoctoral research project 'The Hysteric as Conceptual Operator' [J4164- G24], sponsored by the Austrian Science Fund [FWF], and situated at the University of California Los Angeles, Stanford University, and the University of Vienna (2018-2020).