DrJivitesh Vashisht

My research spans the following multidisciplinary fields: literary and cultural production from modernism to the present day; medical humanities; psychoanalysis as a critical and clinical practice; and sensory studies (in particular Sound and Voice studies). The figure of the author as reader, and the resulting interface between a writer's critical and critical corpus, has been the through-line of my work in these areas. I have published extensively on Samuel Beckett in this context, in relation to other writers and thinkers including W. B. Yeats, Marcel Proust, Harold Pinter, and Roland Barthes. Until recently I contributed an annual review essay on psychoanalysis to The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory (Oxford University Press).

My IRC-funded project examines the literary determinants and cultural legacies of narrative neurology from the late 20th century to present day. It focusses on the neurological tradition of “Romantic Science” (encompassing A. R. Luria, Oliver Sacks, and their contemporary legatees such as Jonathan Cole) in relation to a multi-national and multi-media corpus of fiction, life writing, theatre, and performance. My aim is to tell a somewhat different story of the encounter between literature and neuroscience in this period: by attending to its overlooked formal dimension, and identifying new stakeholders (Anthony Burgess, Harold Pinter, Brian Friel) in this crucial literary/scientific exchange.

Early work from this new project has been the basis of recent talks and publications. Representative instances include a forthcoming chapter, on illness, phenomenology, and “Romantic Science”, in Bloomsbury’s Key Concepts in Medical Humanities (ed. Ulrika Maude, 2024); an invited talk on Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings and Harold Pinter’s A Kind of Alaska for the ‘Pinter and Adaptation’ symposium (University of Reading, 1st September 2023); and a public lecture on the soundscapes of radiophonic psychotherapy (IASH Edinburgh, 19th June 2021).

My doctoral research analysed the figuration of the woman as disembodied voice in Samuel Beckett’s theatre, radio, television, and critical work. It retraced this “sonic femininity” to Beckett’s intertextual engagement with his modernist precursors on the one hand, and his reading notes on psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theories of sexual difference on the other hand. Key aspects of this work have appeared, or are forthcoming, as articles and book chapters in leading publications such as The Journal of Beckett Studies (2020), The Journal of Modern Literature (2024), and Telepoetics (Edinburgh University Press, 2024).