Anna Łebkowska, in turn, in an article published in the second volume of Kulturowa teoria literatury (Cultural Theory of Literature), proposes the term “ somatopoetyka” ( “somatopoetics”) (Łebkowska, 2012). These hedonistic aspects of writing and reading are inseparably connected with the notion of a “reading body” – corporeal, material and open to the sexual (in the case of the French author – homosexual) pleasures of the subject.
Anna Burzyńska, writing in one of the chapters of Anty-teoria literatury (the Anti-theory of Literature) on Barthes' project of transferring the sphere of intimacy and the pleasure of reading category to the theory of literature, notes that “eading has become for Barthes simply a way of experiencing ‘the joy of writing’, and not a compulsion to seek content, paralysing all pleasure”. The terms, theoretical perspectives and sub-branches are, of course, legion. On the other hand, the enormous wealth of material – from the deformed pieces of meat in Francis Bacon's oil paintings, through the medical-historical novels of Per Olov Enquist such as The Visit of the Royal Physician, to the dissertations on the psychophysical background of disease conditions by the young Friedrich Schiller (a medical doctor by training) – opens up a wide and fascinating field of research for humanists. Like all the so-called interdisciplinary areas of the humanities, it brings new, unexpected perspectives to the interpretation of verbal and visual works, but also has problematic aspects, the most important of which is the limited competence of the vast majority of humanists in understanding and describing contemporary medical and natural science practices. The branch of humanities known as medical humanities, situated on the border between literature studies, anthropology, cultural theory and medical sciences, has been experiencing turbulent development for over a decade.
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