LITERATURE AND MEDICINE最新文献

Abstract:

This essay asks whether poetry can articulate the experience of maternal loss, paying particular attention to questions of form. Focusing on two British poetry collections, Rebecca Goss's Her Birth (2013) and Karen McCarthy Woolf's An Aviary of Small Birds (2014), I argue that the contemporary elegy is currently being reshaped to explore the grief of losing a baby, and to bear witness to a life briefly lived. Drawing on Caroline Levine's emphasis on the affordances of form, the essay first examines these elegies' aural qualities thorugh the motif of the echo. Next I attend to the shaping of the poems, and how their word placement gives weight to the experience of baby loss. Finally, I consider how the modes of address at the end of the two collections negotiate the possibility of moving forward.

Abstract:

Narrative has long been central to the study of literature about illness, but we err if we assume that memoir and fiction alone depict the embodied experience of physical suffering. Contemporary writers also turn to the essay. In French, essayer means to attempt, and writing essays requires facing difficult questions and predicaments, confronting uncertainty and the unknown. Among recent literary essays, many are about women in pain. These include Eula Biss's "The Pain Scale" (2005) and Leslie Jamison's "Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain" (2014). Each of these writers asks: How, when, and why do we suffer? Why is women's pain so often diminished, dismissed, and misunderstood? And why, in response to the suffering of others, do we regularly fail to provide what is needed?

Abstract:

Storytelling is good for us—or so we are told. This article examines two memoirs, by Hilary Mantel and Susanna Kaysen, in which narrating experiences of gynecological pain provokes shame and deepens pain. By attending to shame as a textual presence, I intervene in a longstanding debate about how to make sense of pain and illness. Shame, I argue, reveals the presence of multiple (and often contrasting) illness narratives; I analyze these narratives, and their interplay, across Mantel's and Kaysen's memoirs. As scholarship moves beyond, past, or post-narrative, I urge us to stay: to interrogate the ways in which illness narratives interact—amplifying some stories and storytellers whilst fragmenting or silencing others—and to examine the responsibility we all have within this collective sense-making.

Abstract:

This essay explores the differences in the narrative forms of mental illness, depending on whether the sources consulted come from published medical histories or archival material. Based on the study of dozens of clinical cases contained in, above all, the institutions of Charenton and Bicêtre, from the late eighteenth century to the 1850s, I argue that the distinctive feature of the clinical case was vehemence rather than delirium. My methodological approach is based on the conceptualization of the forms of experience proposed by the philosopher of history Reinhart Koselleck.

Abstract:

This article analyzes Maggie Nelson's Bluets (2009) as a prominent example of the fragmentary narration that can result from the experience of pain and loss. I demonstrate how Nelson's disparate ruminations on her obsession for the color blue, her heartbreak, and her quadriplegic friend's chronic pain defy the superimposition of a teleological plot over these experiences, in favor of episodic reading and sporadic not-knowing. Still, the autofictional nature of the text—with its alternatively overbearing and elusive authorial presence—challenges any naïve emotional investment in it. Focusing on Nelson's narration of her quadriplegic friend's experience of chronic pain, I conclude by highlighting how Bluets calls for a reconsideration of the reader's stance vis-à-vis the description of suffering, as well as of simplistic critical approaches to illness narratives as life-writing.

Abstract:

What might ethnography—as both practice and text—offer for thinking about and with non-narrative forms of pain representation? Ethnography operates as an inherently fragmentary, episodic form of knowledge-making: the central acts of observing and writing social life rest upon moments plucked and crafted from the unruly, relentless rush of intersubjective experience. Bringing an ethnographic sensibility to bear on clinical encounters around pain thus attunes us to both the partiality and the sociality of representation. Drawing from ongoing research into how clinicians encounter patients' pain, here I hold together two ethnographic moments, reading across them to explore the consequential forms of attention and of representation at work in the ephemeral utterances and exchanges of everyday work in clinical settings.

Philippe Forest's first autofictional novel, L'Enfant éternel (The eternal child), centers on the terminal illness and eventual death of the author's daughter, Pauline. While scholarly attention has been directed toward the role of the text in caring for the child, this essay addresses the absence of care for Pauline's parents and their marginalization throughout her end-of-life hospitalization. Focusing on questions of genre, agency, and legacy, I argue that the text allows for a rewriting of the previous, negative experience of care in a way that incorporates the father into care provision. This corrective rewriting understands literature as palliative in its own right, capable of retaining identity, restoring relationships, and facilitating holistic care that "adds life" to all concerned.