LITERATURE AND MEDICINE最新文献

Abstract:

Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) represents physical pain as a multidimensional experience entwined with history, language, and culture. By linking descriptions of anti-Black racist encounters with the imagery of somatic aches, Rankine blurs the boundaries between psychological suffering and physical distress to offer readers a nuanced depiction of the way racist discourse can both cause and, most crucially, shape one's private perception of corporeal agony. She zeros in on the experience of headaches to represent the interwoven relationship between the psycholinguistic contours of thought and bodily hurt, insisting that physical pain is more than a physiological alarm whose essence lies outside of language and culture.

Abstract:

In operation for over a century, the Indian Residential School system is a painful part of Canadian history. Through the theoretical approaches to pain envisioned by Elaine Scarry, Javier Moscoso, and Ilit Ferber, this article examines how the pain of residential school experiences manifests as silence among residential school survivors. Through a close analysis of narratives that break free from that silence, it becomes apparent that narrative offers one path to national reconciliation. While arguing in favor of narrative as a path towards national reconciliation, this article cautions readers against reducing residential school narratives to a form of trauma spectatorship.

• Guest Editor's Introduction:Pain's Plurals and Narrative Disruption: Communicating Pain and Honoring Its Telling
• Sara Wasson (bio)

How to narrate an illnessin fairer climates andto fair-weather figures.

*

How not to.

—Amy Allara¹

Pain may be a wind, a mist, live burial, a rubbish tip, a concrete suit, shattered glass, a knife.² Discussions of pain can readily become a list of the vivid metaphors created as people reach for language in extremity.³ Each of these metaphors—and this entire theme issue—is an example of the way pain generates words: it inspires telling. Yet despite such an abundance of language, a refrain of "invisibility" remains disturbingly prevalent in the lived experience of many people with pain, both mental and physical (and indeed pain problematizes that divide in multiple ways). This introduction to this issue will review and contextualize relevant recent debates in the cultural studies of pain. One of my primary aims in curating this issue is to acknowledge that insofar as pain experience poses challenges to representation, that is less a function of any intrinsic unspeakability of pain, and more of a varying cultural legibility of pain. Expectations of illness story—in the sense of both the events and the narrative of those events, the way they are told—has a direct impact on what kinds of pain experience [End Page 283] can most readily be heard, and who is heard. Cultural contexts and expectations of illness story influence what can be heard in pain, what can be known about it, and who is respected as knowing. These are matters of epistemic justice.⁴

Each article in this issue examines writing which brings pain vividly to life, and shows how a particular telling of pain requires unsettling certain conventions of writing or illness expression. While narratology notes the difference between story (events, plot) and narrative (the telling of those events), the essays in this issue are less concerned with precise narratological anatomization of narrative, and more interested in the cultural work done by narratives, by the telling of events within specific forms.⁵ Writing pain may require disruptions, textual experimentation and the breaching of cultural expectations of what narratives should do and who should tell them.

Pain takes many forms and has many temporalities. In the form of "chronic" or persistent pain, for example, it affects over 20 percent of all adults in the US, and for 12 percent of those people the pain severely impacts multiple parts of their life.⁶ Global estimat

Abstract:

Recent studies of pain have disputed the idea that pain eludes representation in language. Where these have largely focused on the experience of pain, my paper examines the epistemological function of pain in crime fiction, a genre that by definition foregrounds meaning: what and how we know. A good crime story depends structurally on resolution, but its pleasure derives more thoroughly from suspense. Pain would seem to defy those logics; surely we long for its ending, not its persistence. Yet many contemporary detectives do their work in pain, embodying an impossible contradiction between chaos and order. This suggests that pain is somehow integral to the process of knowing, inviting us to rethink pain as disrupting rather than constituting the forward motion of meaning.

Abstract:

How might flash writing be useful in communicating chronic pain? This question drove the UKRI AHRC-funded project Translating Chronic Pain at Lancaster University (2017–2019), which focused on the potential of fragmentary, episode-driven forms. This article examines how the ultra-short form and navigation architectures of the Translating Pain online anthology facilitate a polyphony of responses to pain that neither deny the validity of distress nor make recovery a solitary, individual act. The anthology's polyphony of voices encompasses a broad register of affects and, at times, offers a commitment to the inconclusive—to ambivalent and unfinished experiences of pain, without moving too quickly to culturally sanctioned closures of optimism or individual overcoming.