LITERATURE AND MEDICINE最新文献

Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden has been a repugnant object for contemporary scholars of disability studies because of the equivalence it draws between able embodiment and morality. While scholars have remarked on the novel's linguistic register of rectitude, few have focused on what it might mean to analyze The Secret Garden through the prism of shame. I attempt to develop such a reading here, exploring shame's textual and historical multivalence. I will ask: what is at stake-affectively and critically-in the practice of re-reading a novel that one experienced first in childhood? What is created, and what is effaced or over-written, in the temporal distance of adulthood and the critical distance afforded by a theoretical framework unavailable to the child?

This article offers a reading of Johanna Hedva's "Sick Woman Theory" in relation to shame and pride in the context of unexplained illness-illness, that is, for which there is no found organic marker in relation to the symptoms experienced by the patient, and which is often chronic. People with unexplained illness find themselves without discursive backing and are especially prone to shame and stigmatization. Hedva politicizes their illness against the backdrop of a capitalist ideology, identifying chronic illness as a material-discursive phenomenon and uncoupling it from individual blame and responsibility. Bridging queer and crip discussions on shame and pride with approaches to illness within the medical humanities, I read Hedva's iconic "Sick Woman Theory" as an activist strategy for the emancipation of people with unexplained illness.

That self-harm is a shameful practice is often taken for granted. However, recent sociological work has called attention to the way this shamefulness is actively constructed through narrative. This essay takes up that call, with a particular focus on fictional representations. It takes an interdisciplinary approach, weaving together a close reading of Tim Blake Nelson's 2015 film Anesthesia with data from interviews with people with experience of self-harm. Specifically, it attends to the location of shame in a "type" of self-harming character, the significance of visibility and exposure in narratives of self-harm, the function of genre in invoking or communicating shame, and the uncertain relationship between destigmatization and the enforcement of norms. It thus explores shame as contingent, relational, and actively brought into being.

Situated at the intersection of literature and medicine, Autobiography of a Face offers a unique opportunity to explore the interrelationship of shame and illness. By interleaving what Grealy thought she knew with what she later learned (but still struggles to comprehend), Autobiography of a Face represents shame as a kind of epistemological fall, the leap from a world of unknowing that Grealy takes as she looks back at her experience of life-altering illness. In her autobiographical account, Grealy examines what it means to literally and figuratively "face" shame-to both acknowledge and give expression to it in the aftermath of pediatric cancer and recovery.

While the breaking of silence on abortion is generally attributed to feminist mobilization, this essay argues that the popularization of female-centered narratives in the 1960s and 1970s contributed to a culture shift which played a crucial role in the legalization of abortion in France, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Depicting individual experiences of abortion through stories of women facing unplanned pregnancy and struggling to speak out, these narratives were instrumental in sparking national conversations. While earlier works highlighted the use of euphemistic language in everyday life, narratives from the 1960s and 1970s turned to explicit dialogues, thereby displaying discursive strategies to overcome abortion shame.