Illness and the Limits of Expression PDF Download

Author: Kathlyn Conway
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472116195
Category : Diseases and literature
Languages : en
Pages : 188

View

Book Description
Thought-provoking exploration of illness, writing, and the limits of language

Author: Kathlyn Conway
Publisher: UNM Press
ISBN: 0826353258
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 185

View

Book Description
“Kathlyn Conway opens primordial questions about the shattering events of illness through close readings of selected illness narratives, proposing that only writing of a daring kind can utter the knowledge of the self-telling body. Wielding her ferocious intellect and braving exposure to self and other, Conway makes original discoveries about writing and illness and, more stunningly, about writing and life. Not a book about illness, this is a book about writing and being. It is taut, brave, unequalled in our scholarship, and true. Conway joins our most powerful investigators of the human predicament of mortality, helping us to see, helping us to live.”—Rita Charon, Columbia University, Program in Narrative Medicine Published accounts of illness and disability often emphasize hope and positive thinking: the woman who still looked beautiful after losing her hair, the man who ran five miles a day during chemotherapy. This acclaimed examination of the genre of the illness narrative questions that upbeat approach. Author Kathlyn Conway, a three-time cancer survivor and herself the author of an illness memoir, believes that the triumphalist approach to writing about illness fails to do justice to the shattering experience of disease. By wrestling with the challenge of writing about the reality of serious illness and injury, she argues, writers can offer a truer picture of the complex relationship between body and mind.

Author: Alan Petersen
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1839104759
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 589

View

Book Description
This timely Handbook provides an essential guide to the major topics, perspectives, and scholars in the sociology of health and medicine. Contributors prove the immense value of a sociological understanding of central health and medical concerns, including public health, the COVID-19 pandemic, and new medical technologies.

Author: David B. Morris
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674659716
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 361

View

Book Description
When we or our loved ones fall ill, our world is thrown into disarray, our routines are interrupted, our beliefs shaken. David Morris offers an unconventional, deeply human exploration of what it means to live with, and live through, disease. He shows how desire—emotions, dreams, stories, romance, even eroticism—plays a crucial part in illness.

Author: Jeffrey Berman
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
ISBN: 1789738091
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 337

View

Book Description
Many of the well-respected scholarly studies of autobiographical writing have little or nothing to say about mental illness. This book uncovers the mysterious relationship between mood disorders and creativity through the lives of seven writers, demonstrating how mental illness is sometimes the driving force behind creativity.

Author: Martina Zimmermann
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319443887
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 172

View

Book Description
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This is the first book-length exploration of the thoughts and experiences expressed by dementia patients in published narratives over the last thirty years. It contrasts third-person caregiver and first-person patient accounts from different languages and a range of media, focusing on the poetical and political questions these narratives raise: what images do narrators appropriate; what narrative plot do they adapt; and how do they draw on established strategies of life-writing. It also analyses how these accounts engage with the culturally dominant Alzheimer’s narrative that centres on dependence and vulnerability, and addresses how they relate to discourses of gender and aging. Linking literary scholarship to the medico-scientific understanding of dementia as a neurodegenerative condition, this book argues that, first, patients’ articulations must be made central to dementia discourse; and second, committed alleviation of caregiver burden through social support systems and altered healthcare policies requires significantly altered views about aging, dementia, and Alzheimer’s patients.

Author: Ross Douthat
Publisher: Convergent Books
ISBN: 0593237366
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 225

View

Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • In this vulnerable, insightful memoir, the New York Times columnist tells the story of his five-year struggle with a disease that officially doesn’t exist, exploring the limits of modern medicine, the stories that we unexpectedly fall into, and the secrets that only suffering reveals. “A powerful memoir about our fragile hopes in the face of chronic illness.”—Kate Bowler, bestselling author of Everything Happens for a Reason In the summer of 2015, Ross Douthat was moving his family, with two young daughters and a pregnant wife, from Washington, D.C., to a sprawling farmhouse in a picturesque Connecticut town when he acquired a mysterious and devastating sickness. It left him sleepless, crippled, wracked with pain--a shell of himself. After months of seeing doctors and descending deeper into a physical inferno, he discovered that he had a disease which according to CDC definitions does not actually exist: the chronic form of Lyme disease, a hotly contested condition that devastates the lives of tens of thousands of people but has no official recognition--and no medically approved cure. From a rural dream house that now felt like a prison, Douthat's search for help takes him off the map of official medicine, into territory where cranks and conspiracies abound and patients are forced to take control of their own treatment and experiment on themselves. Slowly, against his instincts and assumptions, he realizes that many of the cranks and weirdos are right, that many supposed "hypochondriacs" are victims of an indifferent medical establishment, and that all kinds of unexpected experiences and revelations lurk beneath the surface of normal existence, in the places underneath. The Deep Places is a story about what happens when you are terribly sick and realize that even the doctors who are willing to treat you can only do so much. Along the way, Douthat describes his struggle back toward health with wit and candor, portraying sickness as the most terrible of gifts. It teaches you to appreciate the grace of ordinary life by taking that life away from you. It reveals the deep strangeness of the world, the possibility that the reasonable people might be wrong, and the necessity of figuring out things for yourself. And it proves, day by dreadful day, that you are stronger than you ever imagined, and that even in the depths there is always hope.

Author: Rüdiger Ahrens
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110580829
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

View

Book Description
This special issue of Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics explores the various functions of metaphor in life writing. Looking at a range of autobiographical subgenres (pathography, disability narratives, memoirs of migration, autofiction) and different kinds of metaphors, the contributions seek to ‘map’ the possibilities of metaphor for narratively framing an individual life and for constructing notions of selfhood.

Author: Mari Armstrong-Hough
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469646692
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 187

View

Book Description
Over the last twenty years, type 2 diabetes skyrocketed to the forefront of global public health concern. In this book, Mari Armstrong-Hough examines the rise in and response to the disease in two societies: the United States and Japan. Both societies have faced rising rates of diabetes, but their social and biomedical responses to its ascendance have diverged. To explain the emergence of these distinctive strategies, Armstrong-Hough argues that physicians act not only on increasingly globalized professional standards but also on local knowledge, explanatory models, and cultural toolkits. As a result, strategies for clinical management diverge sharply from one country to another. Armstrong-Hough demonstrates how distinctive practices endure in the midst of intensifying biomedicalization, both on the part of patients and on the part of physicians, and how these differences grow from broader cultural narratives about diabetes in each setting.

Author: Barry Sheils
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351657518
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 436

View

Book Description
Shame and Modern Writing seeks to uncover the presence of shame in and across a vast array of modern writing modalities. This interdisciplinary volume includes essays from distinguished and emergent scholars in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and shorter practice-based reflections from poets and clinical writers. It serves as a timely reflection of shame as presented in modern writing, giving added attention to engagements on race, gender, and the question of new media representation.