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.

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:

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:

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.

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:

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.