LITERATURE AND MEDICINE最新文献

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 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.

Steven Soderbergh's pandemic thriller Contagion (2011) remains a timely meditation on the global capitalist networks and quotidian, interpersonal interactions through which infectious disease spreads, with reviews and analyses of the film commending its scientific accuracy and chilling presage of COVID-19. The film's sexualized patient zero plotline demands further scrutiny, however. This essay first traces the evolution of the myth of patient zero throughout the twentieth century, documenting how it fuses the highly stigmatized concepts of scapegoat, superspreader, and slut into both a seemingly innocuous stock character and an established feature of outbreak narrative. Contextualizing Contagion's infidelity plot through the myth of patient zero, this essay then critiques the film's patriarchal and homophobic impulses, encouraging us to reimagine our conceptions of risk, blame, and social connection.