Guest Editors' Introduction: Bodies "East" and "West"

This special issue is the fruition of the University of South Carolina's 12th Annual Comparative Literature Conference, entitled "Bodies" and held in Columbia on February 25-27, 2010. With an emphasis on cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approaches, this conference hosted participants from a wide array of fields—art, anthropology, creative writing, film, history, linguistics, literature, medical history, music, philosophy, and religion—and the essays included here are only a small sample of the extremely diverse papers presented at this lively three-day conference.

The topic of the body, of course, is by no means new. A fundamental concept in some of the most established fields, it has been pondered upon, debated about, and treated in various forms of representation for centuries in both "Eastern" and "Western" traditions—from Laozi to Aristotle, from Hokusai Katsushika to Leonardo da Vinci, from Zoroaster to Nietzsche, from Shigehisa Kuriyama to Elizabeth Grosz. Fittingly, the keynote speakers at our conference addressed the representation of the body in Eastern and Western medical discourse. Shigehisa Kuriyama examined the impact of modern technology on our perception of the body and so-called traditional discourses on it; while Peter McIsaac examined the practice of displaying human remains, and critiqued Gunther von Hagens' wildly popular Körperwelten exhibit as merely the latest iteration of a peculiarly German obsession with putting technologically enhanced bodies on display.

That the body as a category of investigation still retains its vigor today has to do with several factors. As a concept that has a crucial role in numerous disciplines—anthropology, medicine, philosophy, religion, just to name a few—the body constitutes an ideal venue for border-crossing, a venue where various concepts, issues, and ideas converge and clash, where disciplines encounter, negotiate, and/or contend with each other. Given our emphasis on interdisciplinarity today, it is no wonder that the body, with its capacity to generate questions, discussions, and debates that transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries, remains one of the most energetically productive domains.

The persistance of engagement with "the body" also has to do with the fact that it occupies a key position in some of the most influential theorists' work produced in the past few decades. Take, for example, Michel Foucault, for whom the regulation of the body demonstrates not only the workings of power, but also the ways the modern subject is formed, and thus constitutes a productive angle from which he can critique modernity.¹ Or Judith Butler, whose groundbreaking book Gender Trouble, which sees the body not as a stable bearer of a fixed gender, but as a surface on which the signification of a so-called "internal core" is performatively enacted, a surface where "a stylized configuration, indeed, a gendered corporealization of time" takes place (179),² has not only had a transformative impact on the field of Women's and Gender Studies but also renewed numerous disciplines' interest in "old" issues such as performance, theatricality, materiality of the body, and identity. Or consider the rise of interest in the history of the senses, a field which in many ways was pioneered by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. While multiple aspects of visual culture have been explored by scholars in recent decades, the history and representation of the other senses are only now receiving serious attention. The work of Richard Leppert, James Johnson, Nora Alter, and Lutz Koepnick has put acoustic culture on the map, and others are beginning to approach culture and literature from gustatory, tactile, and olfactory angles. Meanwhile, the history of the senses is itself entwined with the history of emotions and emotional regimes—another aspect of corporeality. Fear, love, shock, disgust, joy, terror, shame, anger, and other affects are triggered by and refracted through the senses, and represent just one of new directions that research on the body has taken of late.

These are not the only reasons why we pay so much attention to the body, though. We are not interested in the body merely because it has been the locus of debate in various traditions, or because influential people have written about those traditions...