Abstract: In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there was widespread concern about the fate of immigrants to the United States. One area of particular concern was mentally ill immigrants, as illustrated in contemporaneous screening procedures, asylum reports, government commissions, popular media, fiction, and scientific studies. This article examines the depiction of one mentally ill immigrant in O. E. Rølvaag's novel Giants in the Earth within the context of these discussions. The novel, published originally in two parts in 1924 and 1925 in Norwegian, was translated in collaboration with the author into English in 1927. While many explanations were posited for rates of mental illness among immigrants to North America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Rølvaag presents a more nuanced view which accounts for mental responses to change of climate, environment, and cultural loss.
{"title":"Prairie Madness: Mental Illness and Norwegian Immigration to North America in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries","authors":"Virginia Langum","doi":"10.1353/lm.2023.a911451","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2023.a911451","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there was widespread concern about the fate of immigrants to the United States. One area of particular concern was mentally ill immigrants, as illustrated in contemporaneous screening procedures, asylum reports, government commissions, popular media, fiction, and scientific studies. This article examines the depiction of one mentally ill immigrant in O. E. Rølvaag's novel Giants in the Earth within the context of these discussions. The novel, published originally in two parts in 1924 and 1925 in Norwegian, was translated in collaboration with the author into English in 1927. While many explanations were posited for rates of mental illness among immigrants to North America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Rølvaag presents a more nuanced view which accounts for mental responses to change of climate, environment, and cultural loss.","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532537","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract: This essay analyzes the representation of dissociative identity disorder in Jennifer Kent's debut feature, The Babadook (2014). Although the film's exploration of psychological themes such as maternal ambivalence, grief, and repression have already been widely discussed in the critical literature, I argue that such readings tend to mitigate the embodied nature of the suffering that Kent's film depicts. Using Arthur Frank's concept of chaos stories as well as Edward Branigan's work on film narrative, I show how The Babadook provides a valuable, fictional example of how dissociative identity disorder can be depicted in cinematic language. Through Kent's use of internal and external focalization, amongst other filmic techniques, the film promotes an ethic of witnessing whereby spectators can actively see the disorienting impact the protagonist's suffering has on her life. In this way, The Babadook gives health care practitioners insight into the complexity of her subjectivized illness experience.
{"title":"Seeing Horror through the Lens of Health: Embodying Dissociative Identity Disorder in The Babadook","authors":"Paul Mitchell","doi":"10.1353/lm.2023.a911447","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2023.a911447","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This essay analyzes the representation of dissociative identity disorder in Jennifer Kent's debut feature, The Babadook (2014). Although the film's exploration of psychological themes such as maternal ambivalence, grief, and repression have already been widely discussed in the critical literature, I argue that such readings tend to mitigate the embodied nature of the suffering that Kent's film depicts. Using Arthur Frank's concept of chaos stories as well as Edward Branigan's work on film narrative, I show how The Babadook provides a valuable, fictional example of how dissociative identity disorder can be depicted in cinematic language. Through Kent's use of internal and external focalization, amongst other filmic techniques, the film promotes an ethic of witnessing whereby spectators can actively see the disorienting impact the protagonist's suffering has on her life. In this way, The Babadook gives health care practitioners insight into the complexity of her subjectivized illness experience.","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532780","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Amidst, By, Near, With:Locating Recovery and Forgetting in the Shadow of COVID Hosanna Krienke (bio) Here are some perhaps too-personal questions to ask yourself: Have you stopped wearing a mask? When did you stop? Do you even remember? When was the first time you forgot to wash your hands as soon as you got home? Do you still hold your breath when a stranger passes too near you on the sidewalk? It has been more than three years since COVID came crashing down on the world. And now, after all this time, we may be wondering what it all meant. When is COVID "over"? What precautions do we keep? What have we learned? Will this experience help us face the next pandemic, or will we forget it ever happened? These questions can be painful for several reasons. Of course, for many people, COVID never ended because of the grief for lost loved ones, because of the lingering symptoms of long COVID, because of the constant vulnerability of chronic conditions, or because of the continued inaccessibility of mRNA vaccines and boosters across the globe. Yet I imagine that many of us can acknowledge a change—perhaps not an ending per se—only a subtle letting-down-your-guard sometime between 2020 and now. We did it at different times. We did it in different ways. We chose different risks. COVID isn't really over; yet that live-wire attentiveness felt by whole communities in the early days may feel like another reality. My goal here is not to shake a finger at our complacency but to think more deeply about the present moment. What can this transitional period—precisely when a new normal emerges to replace the old—tell us about the experience of recovery? [End Page 8] In early 2023, the Washington Post ran a series of articles under the headline "Pandemic: Three Years In." I was immediately struck by the word "in," as if we are buried, or mired, or "in the thick of." None of these feels quite right. Yet it also makes me question alternate vocabularies, and so (as one does) I try to envision other options by Googling a list of prepositions. I wonder, are we "in" or "out" of the pandemic? Are we "after" or even "beyond"? As I look down the list, it strikes me that perhaps the problem is the fundamental linearity of our most conventional terms, as if illness is a one-way street, or a roadside accident you are supposed to see ahead of you, then inch past, and ultimately leave behind. Yet how can this insistent directionality in our language account for three years of grief and hope, boredom and innovation, abject illness and everyday life? In my own scholarship, I have spent years dwelling on the term convalescence, which describes a period of time between the crisis of illness and the mundane routine of life. To me, the months of COVID restrictions, both self-enforced and mandated, felt like convalescence. My world was small. I taught on Zoom. My dog invited me on walks. The bag of dusty carrots at the bottom of my crisper drawer reassured me that I could eke out a few mo
{"title":"Amidst, By, Near, With: Locating Recovery and Forgetting in the Shadow of COVID","authors":"Hosanna Krienke","doi":"10.1353/lm.2023.a911439","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2023.a911439","url":null,"abstract":"Amidst, By, Near, With:Locating Recovery and Forgetting in the Shadow of COVID Hosanna Krienke (bio) Here are some perhaps too-personal questions to ask yourself: Have you stopped wearing a mask? When did you stop? Do you even remember? When was the first time you forgot to wash your hands as soon as you got home? Do you still hold your breath when a stranger passes too near you on the sidewalk? It has been more than three years since COVID came crashing down on the world. And now, after all this time, we may be wondering what it all meant. When is COVID \"over\"? What precautions do we keep? What have we learned? Will this experience help us face the next pandemic, or will we forget it ever happened? These questions can be painful for several reasons. Of course, for many people, COVID never ended because of the grief for lost loved ones, because of the lingering symptoms of long COVID, because of the constant vulnerability of chronic conditions, or because of the continued inaccessibility of mRNA vaccines and boosters across the globe. Yet I imagine that many of us can acknowledge a change—perhaps not an ending per se—only a subtle letting-down-your-guard sometime between 2020 and now. We did it at different times. We did it in different ways. We chose different risks. COVID isn't really over; yet that live-wire attentiveness felt by whole communities in the early days may feel like another reality. My goal here is not to shake a finger at our complacency but to think more deeply about the present moment. What can this transitional period—precisely when a new normal emerges to replace the old—tell us about the experience of recovery? [End Page 8] In early 2023, the Washington Post ran a series of articles under the headline \"Pandemic: Three Years In.\" I was immediately struck by the word \"in,\" as if we are buried, or mired, or \"in the thick of.\" None of these feels quite right. Yet it also makes me question alternate vocabularies, and so (as one does) I try to envision other options by Googling a list of prepositions. I wonder, are we \"in\" or \"out\" of the pandemic? Are we \"after\" or even \"beyond\"? As I look down the list, it strikes me that perhaps the problem is the fundamental linearity of our most conventional terms, as if illness is a one-way street, or a roadside accident you are supposed to see ahead of you, then inch past, and ultimately leave behind. Yet how can this insistent directionality in our language account for three years of grief and hope, boredom and innovation, abject illness and everyday life? In my own scholarship, I have spent years dwelling on the term convalescence, which describes a period of time between the crisis of illness and the mundane routine of life. To me, the months of COVID restrictions, both self-enforced and mandated, felt like convalescence. My world was small. I taught on Zoom. My dog invited me on walks. The bag of dusty carrots at the bottom of my crisper drawer reassured me that I could eke out a few mo","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532781","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Something Is Wrong Rachel Fein-Smolinski (bio) "Relief from pain through palliative artmaking can save us from the discomfort of living with this injustice and violence that we see every day, but it does not treat the basis for the pain. […] Is the artist perhaps unconsciously at first trying to fight inevitable death by stacking up the artworks? Hiding the foregone erasure of the body?" —Barbara Hammer, The Art of Dying or (Palliative Art Making in the Age of Anxiety) (2018) "Dr. Bailey: What is the most important step in the treatment process? Anyone? Dr. Avery: Physical Exam. Dr. Bailey: No, no chocolate for you. Dr. Yang: Lab and radiology evaluation. Dr. Bailey: Uh, oh, come on people. Now you're embarrassing me. Dr. Grey: Patient history. Dr. Bailey: Thank you." —Grey's Anatomy, Season 6, Episode 15 (2010) Fun fact: Something is wrong, and it has been for a long time. The epigraphs are from Barbara Hammer's final lecture on death, illness, and art as a prolific experimental filmmaker living with cancer, and Dr. Miranda Bailey, a fictional surgeon who values her patients' voices more than any other character in the medical drama Grey's Anatomy. In Hammer's lecture she used the term palliative artmaking to describe her practice. Palliative care is a medical practice focused on comfort, support, and symptom relief as opposed to cure. Reframing art making (and life) with those goals in mind informs how I make work as a chronically ill artist and educator. The many hours I have spent watching Grey's Anatomy—and other sexy, utopian (at least the early seasons) healthcare fantasies—informs this work as well. [End Page 26] Art and medicine are estranged siblings. Photographs are good at decontextualizing their subjects from the world that they exist in. A medical exam room is good at decontextualizing a person from the world they exist in. A person becomes a patient when their first-person experience is translated into third-person narrative. When looking at medical archives, the preservation of the historical context of the experiences of patients is a vital job of archivists and researchers. I collect and make images of the visual codices of illness, and share my own archive of experiences as a sick artist to explore mythologies of recovery. I began visiting medical archives in 2018 while I was working a 9 to 5 job, teaching part time, and unsuccessfully trying to manage worsening chronic pain that I have had since I was a child. I started going to the Archives and Special Collections at SUNY Upstate Medical University Health Sciences Library in the morning before work to photograph objects from their collections and to look through unprocessed negatives, usually large-format portraits of patients. Through this I have found a deep well of documentation of intimate patient experience in a field whose narrative is often told from the perspective of the clinician. I have been hearing the term "evidence-based" a lot lately, mostly from my health insu
{"title":"Something Is Wrong","authors":"Rachel Fein-Smolinski","doi":"10.1353/lm.2023.a911441","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2023.a911441","url":null,"abstract":"Something Is Wrong Rachel Fein-Smolinski (bio) \"Relief from pain through palliative artmaking can save us from the discomfort of living with this injustice and violence that we see every day, but it does not treat the basis for the pain. […] Is the artist perhaps unconsciously at first trying to fight inevitable death by stacking up the artworks? Hiding the foregone erasure of the body?\" —Barbara Hammer, The Art of Dying or (Palliative Art Making in the Age of Anxiety) (2018) \"Dr. Bailey: What is the most important step in the treatment process? Anyone? Dr. Avery: Physical Exam. Dr. Bailey: No, no chocolate for you. Dr. Yang: Lab and radiology evaluation. Dr. Bailey: Uh, oh, come on people. Now you're embarrassing me. Dr. Grey: Patient history. Dr. Bailey: Thank you.\" —Grey's Anatomy, Season 6, Episode 15 (2010) Fun fact: Something is wrong, and it has been for a long time. The epigraphs are from Barbara Hammer's final lecture on death, illness, and art as a prolific experimental filmmaker living with cancer, and Dr. Miranda Bailey, a fictional surgeon who values her patients' voices more than any other character in the medical drama Grey's Anatomy. In Hammer's lecture she used the term palliative artmaking to describe her practice. Palliative care is a medical practice focused on comfort, support, and symptom relief as opposed to cure. Reframing art making (and life) with those goals in mind informs how I make work as a chronically ill artist and educator. The many hours I have spent watching Grey's Anatomy—and other sexy, utopian (at least the early seasons) healthcare fantasies—informs this work as well. [End Page 26] Art and medicine are estranged siblings. Photographs are good at decontextualizing their subjects from the world that they exist in. A medical exam room is good at decontextualizing a person from the world they exist in. A person becomes a patient when their first-person experience is translated into third-person narrative. When looking at medical archives, the preservation of the historical context of the experiences of patients is a vital job of archivists and researchers. I collect and make images of the visual codices of illness, and share my own archive of experiences as a sick artist to explore mythologies of recovery. I began visiting medical archives in 2018 while I was working a 9 to 5 job, teaching part time, and unsuccessfully trying to manage worsening chronic pain that I have had since I was a child. I started going to the Archives and Special Collections at SUNY Upstate Medical University Health Sciences Library in the morning before work to photograph objects from their collections and to look through unprocessed negatives, usually large-format portraits of patients. Through this I have found a deep well of documentation of intimate patient experience in a field whose narrative is often told from the perspective of the clinician. I have been hearing the term \"evidence-based\" a lot lately, mostly from my health insu","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532785","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay explores the connections between the modern autism intervention Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) and medieval personification allegory to show how literature powerfully enables the work of neurodiversity. Invoking the theory of the language game to investigate the clinical history of ABA, the essay puts the fourteenth-century poet William Langland in dialogue with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell. I argue that the approach to language emerging from this constellation of voices works as a precise tool for diagnosing the ethical liabilities of ABA. By highlighting the shared interest in a set of animated terms across different historical and disciplinary domains, we can see how allegorical writing becomes an essential resource for exposing how ABA travesties human need and emotion. Working against the ethos of this "therapeutic" intervention, Langland, Wittgenstein, and Cavell join with autistic writers in advancing a model of language development based on mutuality, reciprocity, and shared forms of life.
{"title":"Allegorical Investigations: Autism, Applied Behavioral Analysis, and Medieval Poetry","authors":"Kate Crassons","doi":"10.1353/lm.2023.a911445","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2023.a911445","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay explores the connections between the modern autism intervention Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) and medieval personification allegory to show how literature powerfully enables the work of neurodiversity. Invoking the theory of the language game to investigate the clinical history of ABA, the essay puts the fourteenth-century poet William Langland in dialogue with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell. I argue that the approach to language emerging from this constellation of voices works as a precise tool for diagnosing the ethical liabilities of ABA. By highlighting the shared interest in a set of animated terms across different historical and disciplinary domains, we can see how allegorical writing becomes an essential resource for exposing how ABA travesties human need and emotion. Working against the ethos of this \"therapeutic\" intervention, Langland, Wittgenstein, and Cavell join with autistic writers in advancing a model of language development based on mutuality, reciprocity, and shared forms of life.","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532782","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract: American fiction often tells us that there is something sick about romantic desire. But the writers who I discuss in this article told their readers this even as they critiqued the medical profession's pathologization of women's desires and non-normative sexual subjectivities. In particular, this article looks at two literary responses to the medical notion that marriage was a cure for hysteria and other nervous disorders: Oliver Wendell Holmes's A Mortal Antipathy (1885) and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's Doctor Zay (1886). While the medical rhetoric of nervous pathology could be repressive and stigmatizing, these fictions sought to reclaim and reimagine the medical treatment of nervous desire in subversive ways.
{"title":"Diagnosing Desire: Imaginative Experiments with Sexuality and the Nerves","authors":"Ira Halpern","doi":"10.1353/lm.2023.a911450","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2023.a911450","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: American fiction often tells us that there is something sick about romantic desire. But the writers who I discuss in this article told their readers this even as they critiqued the medical profession's pathologization of women's desires and non-normative sexual subjectivities. In particular, this article looks at two literary responses to the medical notion that marriage was a cure for hysteria and other nervous disorders: Oliver Wendell Holmes's A Mortal Antipathy (1885) and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's Doctor Zay (1886). While the medical rhetoric of nervous pathology could be repressive and stigmatizing, these fictions sought to reclaim and reimagine the medical treatment of nervous desire in subversive ways.","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532788","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Editor's Foreword:Remembering Carol Donley Michael Blackie The field of Literature and Medicine has lost one of its most passionate early proponents. Carol Donley, cofounder of Hiram College's Center for Literature and Medicine and the Literature and Medicine book series published by Kent State University Press, among other remarkable achievements, died this past April from complications of Covid. I met Carol in 2008, when I joined the faculty at Hiram to teach in the Biomedical Humanities program there, the first of its kind in the US, and to participate in the Center's programming. But her influence on me as a mentor began years before, when in the Modern Language Association publication Teaching Literature and Medicine I came across a course she had codesigned and taught at Hiram called "The Tyranny of the Normal."1 What an inspiring gift. I developed a course based on Carol's class that followed it closely, down to the name. But as I became more comfortable asking the kinds of questions the course modeled, and as my knowledge of the field expanded, I renamed it "Perils of the Normal." I've since taught numerous permutations of the class in two baccalaureate programs and two medical schools over the last twenty years, each iteration becoming more reflective of the dynamic field Carol helped create. Another example of Carol's vision for what we now call the Health Humanities is captured in an essay she wrote for Literature and Medicine's 10th anniversary.2 Beginning by praising the journal for its analysis of healers beyond the white, heroic male physician to celebrate contributions from nursing and other allied health professions, she then puts forth a list of research topics for future work. The list is prescient. It anticipates developments in the field, like the emphasis on illness experiences as a genre and the importance of narrative, while also foreseeing the challenges of our present moment. For example, she demands that our scholarly agendas "include more research on images of black Americans as healers and on the images of other minorities [End Page 1] in America (Native American, Hispanic, Asian American)" (30). She provides a series of guiding questions for this work, such as "What do healers within these groups mean to the members of the groups?" and "What limits do the prejudices of the majority impose on them?" (30). Another research agenda she identifies is the essential but largely unacknowledged contributions of informal caregivers. "We need," she argues, "studies of the images of healers out in the streets and in the homes, members of the family, as often as not, who have taken on that role" (31). These questions are as relevant today as they were in 1991 and make clear how much work remains to be done in the field—and in the pages of this journal. I came across Carol's reflective essay when I was writing my own for Literature and Medicine's 40th anniversary. Reading it reminded me of how much I've gained from her mentorship,
{"title":"Editor's Foreword: Remembering Carol Donley","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/lm.2023.a911437","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2023.a911437","url":null,"abstract":"Editor's Foreword:Remembering Carol Donley Michael Blackie The field of Literature and Medicine has lost one of its most passionate early proponents. Carol Donley, cofounder of Hiram College's Center for Literature and Medicine and the Literature and Medicine book series published by Kent State University Press, among other remarkable achievements, died this past April from complications of Covid. I met Carol in 2008, when I joined the faculty at Hiram to teach in the Biomedical Humanities program there, the first of its kind in the US, and to participate in the Center's programming. But her influence on me as a mentor began years before, when in the Modern Language Association publication Teaching Literature and Medicine I came across a course she had codesigned and taught at Hiram called \"The Tyranny of the Normal.\"1 What an inspiring gift. I developed a course based on Carol's class that followed it closely, down to the name. But as I became more comfortable asking the kinds of questions the course modeled, and as my knowledge of the field expanded, I renamed it \"Perils of the Normal.\" I've since taught numerous permutations of the class in two baccalaureate programs and two medical schools over the last twenty years, each iteration becoming more reflective of the dynamic field Carol helped create. Another example of Carol's vision for what we now call the Health Humanities is captured in an essay she wrote for Literature and Medicine's 10th anniversary.2 Beginning by praising the journal for its analysis of healers beyond the white, heroic male physician to celebrate contributions from nursing and other allied health professions, she then puts forth a list of research topics for future work. The list is prescient. It anticipates developments in the field, like the emphasis on illness experiences as a genre and the importance of narrative, while also foreseeing the challenges of our present moment. For example, she demands that our scholarly agendas \"include more research on images of black Americans as healers and on the images of other minorities [End Page 1] in America (Native American, Hispanic, Asian American)\" (30). She provides a series of guiding questions for this work, such as \"What do healers within these groups mean to the members of the groups?\" and \"What limits do the prejudices of the majority impose on them?\" (30). Another research agenda she identifies is the essential but largely unacknowledged contributions of informal caregivers. \"We need,\" she argues, \"studies of the images of healers out in the streets and in the homes, members of the family, as often as not, who have taken on that role\" (31). These questions are as relevant today as they were in 1991 and make clear how much work remains to be done in the field—and in the pages of this journal. I came across Carol's reflective essay when I was writing my own for Literature and Medicine's 40th anniversary. Reading it reminded me of how much I've gained from her mentorship,","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532539","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract: Thomas Bernhard's novella Wittgenstein's Nephew is typically read as a quasi-memoir about Bernhard's relationship with Paul Wittgenstein, the nephew of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. But Bernhard is up to something else. The novella dramatizes the different ways that language and storytelling defend against anxieties associated with illness and mortality. Bernhard is able to show this defense mechanism at work while simultaneously crafting a broken narrative that tells a story of its own, a story of an illness that cannot be contained in usual narrative threads and that asks for new forms of storytelling. He thus reveals at once both the concealing and disclosive potential of language in the face of illness as he finds innovative ways to embody the experience of illness in the very fabric of the text.
{"title":"Paraphrasing Finitude: Seeking Refuge from Death in Thomas Bernhard's Wittgenstein's Nephew","authors":"Madalina Meirosu","doi":"10.1353/lm.2023.a911449","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2023.a911449","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Thomas Bernhard's novella Wittgenstein's Nephew is typically read as a quasi-memoir about Bernhard's relationship with Paul Wittgenstein, the nephew of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. But Bernhard is up to something else. The novella dramatizes the different ways that language and storytelling defend against anxieties associated with illness and mortality. Bernhard is able to show this defense mechanism at work while simultaneously crafting a broken narrative that tells a story of its own, a story of an illness that cannot be contained in usual narrative threads and that asks for new forms of storytelling. He thus reveals at once both the concealing and disclosive potential of language in the face of illness as he finds innovative ways to embody the experience of illness in the very fabric of the text.","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532784","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/lm.2023.a911454","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2023.a911454","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532786","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Recovering a Literary Legacy:The Life of Delores Phillips Delia Steverson (bio) In 2002, after suffering a heart attack, author Delores Phillips miraculously drove herself to a Cleveland hospital. Recovering from complications during her hospitalization, Delores later recalled to her only daughter, Shalana Harris, "Man, I should've died." But Shalana rebuffed, "No, there's a reason why you didn't die. You still have more life to live."1 Less than two years later, in 2004, Shalana's prophetic utterances appeared to be fulfilled when Phillips published The Darkest Child, the only novel she would publish in her lifetime. The story takes place in the fictional town of Pakersfield, Georgia, in 1958, and follows Rozelle Quinn—a resourceful yet cruel and manipulative mother—and her ten children as they attempt to reconcile generational trauma and escape racism and poverty in the Jim Crow south. The narrative is told through the lens of Tangy Mae, the titular "darkest" of all Rozelle's children, who believes that her education is the quickest pathway for fleeing her abusive household. The novel won the Black Caucus American Library Association First Novelist Award in 2005 and was short-listed for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award that same year. With the reception of The Darkest Child, Phillips appeared to have a promising literary future. But after a short and brutal battle with pancreatic cancer, Delores passed away in relative obscurity at the age of 63 in 2014. I was introduced to The Darkest Child in 2017 by a friend and colleague who knew I was researching representations of disability in African American literature. She suggested that the novel—with its attention to a variety of human experiences, including deafness (one of Rozelle's children is deaf and creates her own form of sign language) and madness (there is debate if Rozelle is "mad" or just downright evil)—might be a rich text to enhance my scholarly pursuits. When I read the novel, I found it incredibly poignant, funny, hopeful, and tragic, all at the same time, and I was driven to find out more about this mysterious author. Much to my dismay, other than a short biography [End Page 45] in the back of the book, a bare Wikipedia page, and Phillips's obituary, there seemed to be no substantial information about this formidable artist. Thus armed with Phillips's obituary, I reached out to Shalana on Facebook—and surprisingly, she messaged me back. After a few months of communication, I flew to Cleveland, Ohio, where Shalana and Phillips's sister Linda Miller reside, to discover more about this amazing writer whom I never had the opportunity to meet. Opening their homes and their lives to me through several interviews—over Linda's homemade desserts and Shalana's tuna sandwiches—they shared honest and transparent details about their sister/mother. Over the years, we would sift through boxes of what we would determine were pages of Phillips's unpublished writings, which had been tucked away in Lin
{"title":"Recovering a Literary Legacy: The Life of Delores Phillips","authors":"Delia Steverson","doi":"10.1353/lm.2023.a911442","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2023.a911442","url":null,"abstract":"Recovering a Literary Legacy:The Life of Delores Phillips Delia Steverson (bio) In 2002, after suffering a heart attack, author Delores Phillips miraculously drove herself to a Cleveland hospital. Recovering from complications during her hospitalization, Delores later recalled to her only daughter, Shalana Harris, \"Man, I should've died.\" But Shalana rebuffed, \"No, there's a reason why you didn't die. You still have more life to live.\"1 Less than two years later, in 2004, Shalana's prophetic utterances appeared to be fulfilled when Phillips published The Darkest Child, the only novel she would publish in her lifetime. The story takes place in the fictional town of Pakersfield, Georgia, in 1958, and follows Rozelle Quinn—a resourceful yet cruel and manipulative mother—and her ten children as they attempt to reconcile generational trauma and escape racism and poverty in the Jim Crow south. The narrative is told through the lens of Tangy Mae, the titular \"darkest\" of all Rozelle's children, who believes that her education is the quickest pathway for fleeing her abusive household. The novel won the Black Caucus American Library Association First Novelist Award in 2005 and was short-listed for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award that same year. With the reception of The Darkest Child, Phillips appeared to have a promising literary future. But after a short and brutal battle with pancreatic cancer, Delores passed away in relative obscurity at the age of 63 in 2014. I was introduced to The Darkest Child in 2017 by a friend and colleague who knew I was researching representations of disability in African American literature. She suggested that the novel—with its attention to a variety of human experiences, including deafness (one of Rozelle's children is deaf and creates her own form of sign language) and madness (there is debate if Rozelle is \"mad\" or just downright evil)—might be a rich text to enhance my scholarly pursuits. When I read the novel, I found it incredibly poignant, funny, hopeful, and tragic, all at the same time, and I was driven to find out more about this mysterious author. Much to my dismay, other than a short biography [End Page 45] in the back of the book, a bare Wikipedia page, and Phillips's obituary, there seemed to be no substantial information about this formidable artist. Thus armed with Phillips's obituary, I reached out to Shalana on Facebook—and surprisingly, she messaged me back. After a few months of communication, I flew to Cleveland, Ohio, where Shalana and Phillips's sister Linda Miller reside, to discover more about this amazing writer whom I never had the opportunity to meet. Opening their homes and their lives to me through several interviews—over Linda's homemade desserts and Shalana's tuna sandwiches—they shared honest and transparent details about their sister/mother. Over the years, we would sift through boxes of what we would determine were pages of Phillips's unpublished writings, which had been tucked away in Lin","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532540","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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