Böcker av Eleni Stecopoulos

A virtuosic inquiry into the forms and uses of healing, from ancient and modern medicine to contemporary literature, ecology, and protest.In the era of the “chronic acute” long predating COVID-19, Eleni Stecopoulos set out to investigate the imagination, aesthetics, and ideology of healing—its mysteries and mystifications, its many channels and codes. Fusing lyric inquiry with cultural criticism, Dreaming in the Fault Zone explores art’s treatment of our conditions at a time of both increased cynicism about healing and longing for it. Stecopoulos talks to physicians, poets, psychotherapists, disability activists, ethnographers, spiritual seekers; curates performances and takes part in community rituals; documents pilgrimages and visits therapeutic landscapes. Whether writing about the poet H.D.’s psychoanalysis with Freud or madness and apartheid in Bessie Head’s novel A Question of Power, the salve of demagogues or a global alliance of people with contested illnesses, Stecopoulos confronts the poetics and politics of affliction, empathy, memory, and survival. Weaving together esoteric scenes and everyday practice, with flashes of humor, these essays travel in a space of impasse and unending experiment.

*Of interest to people interested in creative approaches to healing, embodiment, somatics, disability, chronic illness, trauma, people interested in diaspora and immigration; mythology & ritual; readers of lyric essays / creative nonfiction / experimental prose / autotheory; critical medical humanities scholars; people interested in creative approaches to healing, psychology, illness narrative*Author taught in the Language and Thinking program at Bard College 2008-2011.*Author worked with the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University on curating the Poetics of Healing series between 2008-2013. *Author taught at SFSU in Comparative and World Literature, Creative Writing, and English.*Book was written as part of a grant-funded project that created a public forum for exploring healing: The Poetics of Healing: Creative Investigations in Art, Medicine, and Somatic Practice (program series I curated with SFSU Poetry Center, initially supported by Creative Work Fund grant in San Francisco, with some co-sponsorship from UCSF Medical Humanities Initiative)