A Cultural History of Vertigo

Unbalanced

Anindya Raychaudhuri

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2025
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350523531
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The first interdisciplinary history of vertigo, this book covers medical accounts from antiquity to the present, testimonies of lived experience, and literary and cultural representations of vertigo.

Balanced. Stable. Grounded. Levelheaded. Even-keeled. There is a long list of words that demonstrate how we attach extraordinary value to a metaphorical sense of balance. From Alfred Hitchcock's cinema, to Salvador Dalí's art, to the writings of Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bishop – authors and artists have repeatedly used their work to invoke vertigo, or the loss of balance, as a metaphor for trauma, disorientation, even existential crisis. But what about those of us who have to live with a vertigo that is all-too real? Based on more than thirty in-depth interviews with people who live with balance disorders, this book explores the connections between vertigo-as-metaphor and vertigo-as-lived experience.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Critical Interventions in the Medical and Health Humanities
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Vertigo-as-symptom and vertigo-as-metaphor
• 1 ‘Nothing is quite where it is supposed to be’: Negotiating vertiginous spaces
• 2 ‘Moving in a hyperbolic sort of way’: Speed and vertigo
• 3 ‘What if you jumped?’: Acrophobia and the vertigo of heights
• 4 ‘Avoid shopping centres like the plague’: The supermarket and the dizziness of capitalism
• 5 ‘We can’t just go to McDonalds’: Ingestion, expulsion and abject vertigo
• 6 ‘Not quite right in the world’: Vertigo and digital technology
• 7 ‘My life was already smaller’: Pandemic as vertiginous disruption
• Conclusion: A hermeneutics of vertigo
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Copyright Page