Shaking Mermaid: Reading Epilepsy in Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s Novel Außer sich, Prof. Julia Gutterman, UVA

Shaking Mermaid: Reading Epilepsy in Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s Novel Außer sich

What language is there for a body that defies conventional gesturing? In this lecture, I examine the portrayal of epilepsy in Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s 2017 novel Außer sich. I argue that the spectacle of a minor character’s tonic-clonic seizure serves the novel as a visual expression of the ineffable. I additionally explore how the novel frames the epileptic body through animalistic imagery, echoing the nineteenth-century medical and sociocultural construction of the figure of the “epileptic.” While such strategies risk reinforcing culturally entrenched tropes of epilepsy, the novel also probes their limits, prompting reflection on the assumptions inscribed into the epileptic body—and on the critic’s role in reading epilepsy. 

Julia Gutterman is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Virginia. She earned her PhD at Yale University with a dissertation on figurations of the secret in Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s poetry and studied German, English, and Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Amsterdam. Her current project, situated at the intersection of German literature and disability/neurodiversity studies, traces representations of epilepsy in literary works from the nineteenth century to the present.