Dreaming in the Fault Zone : A Poetics of Healing - Eleni Stecopoulos

Dreaming in the Fault Zone

A Poetics of Healing

By: Eleni Stecopoulos

Paperback | 5 January 2024

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A virtuosic inquiry into the forms and uses of healing, from ancient and modern medicine to contemporary literature, ecology, and protest.

In the era of the “chronic acute” long predating COVID-19, Eleni Stecopoulos set out to investigate the imagination, aesthetics, and ideology of healing—its mysteries and mystifications, its many channels and codes. Fusing lyric inquiry with cultural criticism, Dreaming in the Fault Zone explores art’s treatment of our conditions at a time of both increased cynicism about healing and longing for it. Stecopoulos talks to physicians, poets, psychotherapists, disability activists, ethnographers, spiritual seekers; curates performances and takes part in community rituals; documents pilgrimages and visits therapeutic landscapes. Whether writing about the poet H.D.’s psychoanalysis with Freud or madness and apartheid in Bessie Head’s novel A Question of Power, the salve of demagogues or a global alliance of people with contested illnesses, Stecopoulos confronts the poetics and politics of affliction, empathy, memory, and survival. Weaving together esoteric scenes and everyday practice, with flashes of humor, these essays travel in a space of impasse and unending experiment.

Industry Reviews

"Whether [Stecopoulos] is writing on ancient Greek medicine or biomedicine, the talking cure of psychoanalysis or the therapeutic force of poetry, her penetrating intelligence lights up multiple critical and paradoxical insights."

-Alphonso Lingis, author of Irrevocable: A Philosophy of Mortality

"Sure to alter the terms by which we understand illness and health, Eleni Stecopoulos's deeply original meditation is an aesthetic experience and an education. Composed of lines of flight and incantations, learned excavations, and critiques of cure, Dreaming in the Fault Zone introduces a wholly new language by which to understand illegible pain. Stecopoulos's insights on inflammatory response; (hyper)sensitivity; and cruelty in the form of care, should be required reading. This book's radical incursion is irresistible. . ."

-Mary Cappello, author of Life Breaks In

"These essays brim with great intellectual audacity. . . . Here are new scores from an alternate archive of critical repair that views symptom and method, malady and care, now as bricolage and ritual, now as empathy's "experiment wrought from struggle." Dreaming in the Fault Zone touches the ailing imagination while it reaches for the stars: an exhilarating work of poetics."

-Roberto Tejada, author of Why the Assembly Disbanded

"A major meditation on a complex, labyrinthine topic, told from within the labyrinth. Stecopoulos's writing in Dreaming in the Fault Zone is as powerful as in her Visceral Poetics. . ."

-Marcus Boon, author of The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs

"Reading Dreaming in the Fault Zone, I feel like I am being guided through a planetarium on the dome of which is projected-and is constantly revolving/resolving-the human body, through the skin and cells of which a multitude of voices is shining a history and intelligence that is being listened and sensitized into a poetry, and that all of this is happening, miraculously and necessarily, inside the body."

-Brandon Shimoda, author of Hydra Medusa

"Far from the toxic polemics that propose to explain a frozen world, Dreaming in the Fault Zone is a haunting, sometimes soothing, sometimes unsettling, nighttime companion-a murmuring midnight echo from a strange new upside-down world that was here all along."

-Norman Fischer, author of Through a Window

"Dreaming in the Fault Zone is a visionary work of profound compassion . . . experimental, choral, and utterly astonishing. . . I read this book with awe."

-Madhu H. Kaza, author of Lines of Flight

"Among the many spaces and places of healing explored in this encyclopedic book, Eleni Stecopoulos describes the old temple where people, manifestly ailing or not, were invited in to rest and sleep and dream, and in that dreaming find the recipe for their own cure. This book is that temple."

-Abou Farman, author of On Not Dying: Secular Immortality in the Age of Technoscience


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