Jean Walton, URI Professor of English, Women's Studies, Film Media, and Comparative Literature will present "Creative Devolution: A Case of Reverse Peristalsis."

In the context of what Simmel calls the “punctuality, calculability, exactness . . . forced upon life by the complexity and extension of metropolitan existence;” alongside Bergson’s duration, the “continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances;” in the wake of Nietzsche’s melancholy Will that “cannot will backwards . . . cannot break time and time’s covetousness,” a London doctor encounters a patient who seems, miraculously, to have reversed the immutable bodily laws of consumption, digestion, and excretion. In 1896, Rosa P. brought her astonishing symptoms to Doctor W. Parkes Weber, busied the hospital staff with attempts to prove her an impostor, and was eventually hired as a cook in the Kosher kitchen—thereby taking her place in the institution’s larger peristaltic system.

While Parkes Weber concerned himself for the next fifty years with the strictly clinical aspect of this case (its etiology, its diagnosis, its prognosis and treatment), this talk will explore how it figures as a way to think the temporality of the body as a peristaltic subject within larger systems of flow, directionality, and human will.