Antonina Palisano

the 37th hidden saint

Div III, Spring 2013
Human Confection (poetry manuscript) Tubercular Dreamboats: Notes on Poetry, Research, Praxis (reflective research and poetry analysis) Annotated bibliography/itemized essay

Div III Precis, Fall 2012 (updated January 2013)
The undertaking: a poetry series (with the tongue-in-cheek working title of ‘Tubercular Dreamboats’) that examines the cultural presence of death in communities, with a focus on 19th century death culture and the visceral, physical experience of illness. The research will be grounded in endemic pulmonary tuberculosis, but I'll move beyond that into examination of the sick body as a broader subject, including my own subjective experience with illness. I’ll consider the effects of death and illness on identity and creative process; a gendering of tuberculosis, including the emasculated tubercular male and pallid, ‘ideal’ consumptive female; literary depictions of consumption as an ascetic paradigm versus the realities of stigma and isolation; sanatorium and pseudoscience as spaces of moral reform; the culpability of tuberculosis as “constitutional affliction;” social responses to the specter of illness; and my erstwhile ‘dreamboats,’ including the Byronic ideal of consumption as ‘poet’s disease’ and the ways in which romanticized ideal & stigmatized reality interact. Et al.!

I’m particularly interested in the sixty years between 1880 and 1940 as the cultural moment between the discovery of the tubercle bacilli and the isolation of the antibiotic streptomycin. From 1882 onward the disease was diagnosed with relative accuracy, but treatment continued to hinge on altering one’s habits and moral character. There’s an inherent frustration – the empirical certainty of infection juxtaposed against the inability to implement a cure. I’m also looking at the aforementioned ‘specter’ of illness – interrelations between xenophobia and fear of consumption, the misguided but long-held belief that the disease ran in families, and the looming possibility of infection (augmented by limited knowledge of contagion and/or prevention). I’m interested in sanatoria as social spaces, and the subsequent identity shifts of the frequent sanatorium patient. I’ve been thinking in particular about the ways in which illness affects the artist - I’m looking at DH Lawrence’s later poems and the films of surrealist director Jean Vigo, thinking of the ‘congenital’ ill health of the Bronte siblings, and hoping to dig up some first-person accounts of consumption from the time period in question. I'm also interested in Simone Weil as a hinge between the tubercular and the hagiographic - she's a fascinating crux between the praxis of food refusal and the tubercular diathesis. I'd perhaps like to think about how the tubercular aesthetic or diathesis merges with the hysteria and anorexia diagnoses at the end of the 19th century.

Finally, the term ‘consumption’ itself – the language of illness, what it means to waste away, the space inhabited by the sick body – the use of illness as an avenue of purification, and the social construction of a ‘good’ or edifying death; spes phthisica, the ‘false hope’ of the rallying consumptive; the drama of pneumothorax chest surgery, the way in which sanatorium patients were encouraged to monitor their own weight and temperature – unnatural attention to bodily fluids and processes; the borderlands between illness and health, and how one’s sense of self/one’s work/one’s social identity changes as that line is trod or crossed. The sick self is a deviant self; the experience of ill heath can be a radical act.

Academic Work (Final Papers in Parentheses)
Spring 2008

Abnormal Psychology (Eating Disorders: Diagnostic Criteria, Treatment, Etiology, Cross-Cultural Implications, and the Issue of Media Impact) Psychology of Perception (Perceptual Hypersensitivity in the Autistic Spectrum: Auditory Phenomena) Nuns, Saints, and Mystics (Metaphysical States of Prayer in the Writings of Saint Teresa of Avila) Group Improvisation (N/A)

SABBATICAL

Spring 2010

Setting the Stage: Three Planks and a Passion (design and dramaturgy for McDonagh's The Cripple of Inishmaan) The Rise of Secular Jewish Culture (The Window and the Mirror: S. An-sky's Thresholds) Topics in Comparative Religion (Ascetic Intellect: Bruno of Cologne and Nicholas Kempf) Tree Rings and Climate Change (Hemlock vs. Adelgid: The Impact of Microclimate)

Fall 2010

High Spirits: Reading and Writing About Spiritual Experience (revised portfolio of creative and analytical work) The American Religious Experience: Literary and Historical Perspectives (“Order and consistency in the human faculties:” Phrenology and the Physical Orientation of Morality) Israel and Palestine: Clash of Nationalisms (House of Cards: Pathologizing the Jewish Diaspora) Jewish Poetic Tradtions [Mount Holyoke College] (Memory, Truth, and Fact in the Poems of Dan Pagis)

Spring 2011

Yiddish Literature and Culture (The Just: Poems) The Body in Contemporary Philosophy (Take and Eat: Constraint and Consent in the Thought of Simone Weil) Mystics and Texts (Pseudomulier: Marguerite Porete in Context) Reading Contemporary Poetry [Smith College] (series of response papers + recitation of original poem 'Antonina of Nicaea')

Summer 2011 Steiner Summer Program at the National Yiddish Book Center: 7 week intensive language course, conference presentation of original research (What Death Looks Like: The Memorial Practices of Yizker-bikher)

Fall 2011

Plate by Plate: A Poem's Tectonics (portfolio containing five revised poems + artist's statement) Literature of Madness [Amherst College] ("Anything that suffers and dies instead of us is Christ:" Margaret Atwood's Surfacing) Eastern Christianity [Smith College] ("God-loved" and "Hinge-man:" Saint Antony and the Role of the Ascetic) Yiddish [Independent Study with Rachel Rubenstein] (draft of an Avram Sutzkever poem translated from Yiddish to English, Bukh un Beysoylem: Collective Memory and Jewish Community in Holocaust Yizker-bikher)

Spring 2012

Northern Renaissance Art [Mount Holyoke College] (three cumulative exams) Written on the Body: Body Images and Practices in Religious Traditions [Mount Holyoke College] ("A watchword for female deceit:" The Post-Enlightenment Fasting Girl) Creative Writing Poetry with Doug Anderson [University of Massachusetts] (portfolio of ten revised poems) Immaculate Death [Independent Study with Jutta Sperling] (Autonomy, Performativity, Models of Piety: Gemma Galgani and Maria Maddalena de Pazzi)

Summer 2012

Archival Internship at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art

Fall 2012

Teaching Assistant for Women's Writing, Art, and Music 1100-1800 More Eyes: Methods of Writing the Persona (portfolio of ten revised, research-based poems)

January 2013

Collage and Assemblage (2D and 3D collage work, bodies & bones)

Spring 2013

Creative Writing Poetry with Martin Espada [University of Massachusetts] (portfolio of ten revised, research-based poems) What I Found at the Archives [Smith College] (7 week lecture series with a series of response papers)