Towards a New Body: A Critical Analysis of Body Studies from Philosophy to Social Sciences and Literature

Representational studies of the body in literature are not new phenomena; however, the concerns of a new field of body studies, formed in the 1980s in sociology and becoming interdisciplinary soon after, transformed the concept of the body and the meaning of body studies. There are few studies which sketch this paradigm shift for literary researchers and consequently a great many are still confused about what is the body in "body studies". The present research maps out the assemblages which paved the way for this new definition of the body and tries to figure out the sociological studies' line of flight from the previous approaches to the body and also from the present understanding of the body in literary studies. At the end, the present problematics of body studies in literature are briefly analyzed within this framework.