Inhaltszusammenfassung

This dissertation examines four chronic illnesses in narratives of personal experience with these illnesses and how they are represented in different forms of cultural production, i.e., novel, documentary, video film, and memoir. I argue that narrative attention to the experience of illnesses like PTSD, thalassemia, HIV, endometriosis speaks to a “social chronicity”, which is a significant space of investigation for interdisciplinary fields of health studies and care work. The focus on the ...This dissertation examines four chronic illnesses in narratives of personal experience with these illnesses and how they are represented in different forms of cultural production, i.e., novel, documentary, video film, and memoir. I argue that narrative attention to the experience of illnesses like PTSD, thalassemia, HIV, endometriosis speaks to a “social chronicity”, which is a significant space of investigation for interdisciplinary fields of health studies and care work. The focus on the chronic is an effective mode to engage with illnesses and attendant transformations that are experienced over a long period of time and often on a collective scale among marginalized groups. Thus, the chronicity of an illness experience and their narratives unfold in relation to particular histories that are embodied, social, and transnational. These histories are important to be addressed in order to understand porous definitions of a “disease” and various contexts in which notions of “health” are cultivated. Borrowing from concepts in health humanities, medicine, and memory studies, I examine literary descriptions, visual images, and figurative language to suggest these patients’ perspectives work towards performing an ethical sabotage of grounded understandings of health and care work. I call such processes in narratives “slow engagements.” Specifically, I examine the following texts: Hilary Mantel’s Giving Up the Ghost (2003), Dorothy Allison Bastard Out of Carolina (1992), and Richard Fung’s Sea in the Blood (2000). These texts are analyzed both in the light of the above mentioned particular health conditions but also how narratives seek to broaden medically legitimized definitions. The introduction reads current literature in the fields of medical and health humanities which has increasingly valued the role of narratives, and has suggested that medicine, too, as a field is deeply reliant on “interpretation” of a patient’s medical condition (Herndl 1993). Utilizing this fundamental intersection between medicine and literature, the introduction focuses on how the contemporary turn in literary criticism towards negotiating the “materiality” of a phenomenon can be brought into conversation with narratives that are engaged in exploring the materiality of an illness experience through a close analysis of its social and political contexts. The following chapters read each of the texts with a close attention to how an experience of a chronic illness is discussed and the multiple narrative and stylistic lenses that are used to investigate the nature of that experience.» weiterlesen» einklappen

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Klassifikation

DDC Sachgruppe:
Englische Literatur Amerikas