Embodying Liminality: Constructions of Exhaustion Across Medical and Literary Texts in Germany and France, 1880-1930

This thesis analyses late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century German and French medical texts on exhaustion and exhaustion-related syndromes along with representations of exhaustion in literary texts of the same period. Its aim is to explore medical constructions of exhaustion in both countries, including its aetiologies and metaphorical constructs, and the ways in which these theories have been explored in a range of literary texts. The corpus includes texts written by Heinrich Mann (Haltlos, 1890; In einer Familie, 1894; Doktor Biebers Versuchung, 1898), Thomas Mann (Schwere Stunde, 1905; Der Tod in Venedig, 1912), Hermann Hesse (Unterm Rad, 1906; Kurgast, 1925; Die Nürnberger Reise, 1927), Joris-Karl Huysmans (À vau-l'eau, 1882; À Rebours, 1884), Octave Mirbeau (Dans le ciel, 1892-1893; Les 21 jours d'un neurasthénique, 1901), and Marcel Proust (À la recherche du temps perdu, 1913-1927). This project seeks to illuminate the complexity and ambiguity of states of exhaustion, as well as their narrative and metaphorical uses and the tensions between biomedical discourses and subjective experience. On the one hand, this thesis examines how their representations of exhaustion are shaped by cultural and moral values and influenced by dominant medical conceptions of body and mind and constructions of health and disease and the normal and pathological. On the other, it focuses on the various rich aesthetic and creative possibilities the exhaustion trope offers in the literary texts whilst also considering how it allows writers to explore its lived experience and challenge certain medical and social discourses. The thesis pays particular attention to liminality and associated metaphors as a method of capturing exhaustion and its experience. Exhaustion manifests itself as full of paradoxes and a potentially disruptive embodiment that resists and even challenges containment as a liminal condition in-between health and illness, body and mind, disability and ability, visibility and invisibility, absence and presence, limit and limitlessness, stasis and movement, inertia and transformation, and possibility and impossibility. The exhausted find themselves 'on the border' or rather floating in limbo between opposing states, stages, and places. Exhaustion, then, can be conceived as a space of ambiguity and uncertainty. And, in this sense, it can also be envisaged as a locus of resistance or transgression, a creative force, a potential journey towards self-rediscovery and individuation.