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1 results

  • Chapter 25 - Electroshock Therapy and Plath’s Convulsive Poetics

  • from Part VI - Biographical Contexts
  • Edited by Tracy Brain, Bath Spa University
  • Book:
    Sylvia Plath in Context
    Published online:
    03 August 2019
    Print publication:
    22 August 2019, pp 264-274

  • Summary

    Anita Helle provides transdisciplinary perspectives on electroshock therapy as a context for Plath’s fiction. Counter to many critics and biographers, Helle does not ‘diagnose’ Plath. Rather, she historicises Plath’s literary response to an electroshock treatment from both sides of a highly mobile, linguistically multi-valent, and ideologically charged literary and medical spectrum. Plath’s literary responses to electric shock treatment emerge in the context of post-WWII social upheavals. In these, representations of ECT in art and literature recall surrealist aims to shape a counter-aesthetic “convulsive beauty” in response to collective threat.