Becoming Insomniac [electronic resource] : How Sleeplessness Alarmed Modernity /
Scrivner, L.author.
A study of the history of modern insomnia, this book explores how poets, journalists, and doctors of the Victorian period found themselves in near-universal agreement that modernity and sleep were somehow incompatible. It investigates how psychologists, philosophers and literary artists worked to articulate its causes, and its potential cures.
Description based upon print version of record.
Cover; Contents; List of Figures; Acknowledgments; Prologomenon; How it feels to be something on; The plan; 1 A Modern Insomnia; Insomnaissance; Nervous extensions; Insomniac paradox; 2 The Freeing of the Will; Centuries of sensory excess; Je pense, donc ...; The unsettled mind; Scientific rumination; 3 The Narrowing of the Attention; Argus eyes and invisible gorillas; Phenomenologies of attention, historically considered; Into the narrows ...; 4 In Vicious Circles: The Physiologies of Exhaustion; Brain/work; Thermodynamics and prosthetics of the will; (Lacking) the will to sleep
Neurasthenia and the soporific supplement5 Mental Hyperactivity and the Hematologies of Sleep; Bodies; ""The mental activity of women""; The bloody idea; Vicious cycles and paradoxes of cerebral hyperemia; 6 Psychologorrhea; Mind/control; The associationist school and confirmation bias; Mass quackery?; Therapy as logorrhea as critique; 7 Slumber and Self Subdivided; Cogito ergo ego?; Multiple sleeps and insomnias; Hypnotic suggestion as vibration; Auto- suggestion as cause and cure; 8 Prostheses and Antitheses; Night trains (of thought); Mimeses and malingering
Telegraphic simultaneity, two- sided newspapers, and ""thickened"" timeLucem inventioni: light bulbs in the void; 9 Insomniac Modernism; ""An ideal insomnia""; Proto-Modernist insomnia and the monstrous shadows of ""progress""; ""A feverish insomnia:"" the ""fruit of pure will"" and technological embodiment; Eliotian ""pervigilium""; The insomniac sensory subject: light, sound, time, space; Tradition and individual techne; 10 Volitional Regress and Egress; ""Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night""; Willing backwards; Notes; Bibliography; Index
Includes bibliographical references and index.
A study of the history of modern insomnia, this book explores how poets, journalists, and doctors of the Victorian period found themselves in near-universal agreement that modernity and sleep were somehow incompatible. It investigates how psychologists, philosophers and literary artists worked to articulate its causes, and its potential cures.
Social history.
History.
Civilization—History.
Medicine.
History, Modern.
Social History.
History of Science.
Cultural History.
Medicine/Public Health, general.
Modern History.