Tidsskrift for Forskning i Sygdom og Samfund

Pre-Press The Writer as a Patient with a Brain Tumour

2019-10-14T05:45:17+02:00

This article main concern is how professional authors and intellectuals develop illness narratives addressing the experience of having a brain tumour, and how this condition resorts to specific narratological features. Unlike pathographies written by laypersons, autobiographical accounts of illness developed by writers, and intellectuals create a narrative subjectivity that is specifically linked to their professional status rather than to their patient status which is simultaneous with the narrative time. In this article, we analyse two autobiographical novels, addressing the experiences of two European authors and intellectuals suffering from a brain tumour: A Journey Round My Skull (1939[1937]) by Frigyes Karinthy and Until Further Notice, I Am Alive (2012) by Tom Lubbock. These narratives on illness processes related to brain tumours are a place where writers resist the main symptoms and outcomes of this specific disease that, while affecting their cognitive capacities, seem to deprive them of their self-image as writers. Hence, these writings are based on the realignment of their past and present identities (Rimmon-Kenan, 2002: 15-18) always in connection with their images as authors. The comparative analysis presented here is intended as a contribution from the field of literary studies to the understanding of subjectivity in patients, whose narratives are not written to seek cure or to search for a cause or meaning for the disease, but to fight the loss of the writer-patient creative identity and ‘ipseity’ (Derrida, 2009).

Pre-Press The Patient as a Reader

2019-10-14T05:45:07+02:00

Illness narratives can be said to reclaim the voice of the patient, and while they draw much of their strength from a position of experience and loss, they are also highly mediated and constructed narratives. This article studies, how these textual self-representations are formed in relation to intertexts, and how the authors explicitly use other literary texts and enter into a dialogue with them.

Two pathographies are studied, Anders Paulrud’s Fjärilen i min hjärna (“The Butterfly in my Brain”, 2008) and Agneta Klingspor’s Stängt pga hälsosjäl (“Closed due to health reasons”, 2010, and their specific strategies in incorporating other literary texts: Paulrud through assemblage and community, and Klingspor through resistance and critique, especially of narratives the author feels she is supposed to appreciate. In the end, both authors seem to share a view about literature as potentially helpful and meaningful in conveying experiences and even point to a healing potential in narratives and literature.

Pre-Press Cancer narratives on social media as ‘small stories’

2019-10-14T05:44:57+02:00

Cancer narratives shared on social media platforms have received increased academic interest over the last decade but often without sufficiently acknowledging the media specific narrative affordances of these platforms. The article will address this problem, by first presenting a ‘small stories’ approach to studying illness narrative on social media and then putting the approach to work in a case study of a Danish cancer patient’s Instagram profile (@jannelivsnyder66). The paper argues, that the storytelling practices on the profile can be analytically approached by focusing on the interplay between three co-constitutive levels of interaction: 1) a level of the desired illness narrative and position that the narrator, influenced by available cultural discourses and interaction with followers, hopes to be able to tell; 2) a level of sharing everyday posts, which can either support or disturb the desired narrative; 3) a level of follower responses, where relations between the desired narrative and singular posts are monitored through processes of liking and commenting. Followers of social media cancer narratives should in light of this not be understood as an audience witnessing an individual telling his/her “own” story, but rather as crucial contributors to the social interaction and co-creation of desired narratives, subject positions, narrative progress and tellability. In conclusion, the article thus stresses that cancer storytelling on social media, despite the strong biological connection of the disease to an individual body, emerges through inherently social processes of reading, liking, commenting, monitoring and co-deciding narrative practices.

Prepress Doing Illness

2019-10-14T05:44:46+02:00

Through three case studies, thearticleexploreshow digital media have been used in recentyears to depict and comprehend experiences of cancer.Itfirstinvestigatesthe illness blog,specificallySwedish journalist and musician Kristian Gidlund’s immensely popular blogInMy Body, in which he,from 2011 to2013,shared the narrativeofhis struggle with anaggressive,incurable,andultimatelydeadly stomach cancer. ItcontinuesbydiscussingItalianengineer, artist, and hackerSalvatore Iaconesi’sdigital open-source projectLa Cura–TheCure(2012),whichhasgreat relevancefromboththedigital andthemedical humanitiesperspectivesin the way Iaconesi useshispersonal narrative ofbraincancerto encouragepeople tojoinhis struggletofind a cure.Finally,it analyzesthe American coupleRyanandAmyGreen’svideogameThat Dragon, Cancer(2016).Agamedifferingsignificantlyfromvideo and computer games in general andfrom othergames taking cancer as their subjectbyletting the player enter the role of caregiver to a small child dyingofcancer.Expanding onLisa Diedrich’s theoretical concept of “doing illness”, thearticleemphasizes theperformativedimension ofnarratingillnessin digital media, consideringhowtheseauthorsandcreatorsnegotiatewith narrative, cultural,and medialscripts when portrayingtheircancerexperiences.Ithighlights the interactive and participatory dimension of doing illnessin digitalmedia, by exploring howthe blog,open-source project, and videogamebothinviteand limittheaudience’s opportunitiesto interact and participatewith the illness narrativeconveyed.

Pre Press Gothic Infections

2019-10-14T05:44:36+02:00

This article proposes, a reading of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818) as a case study for discussing infectious literature, storytelling as therapy and the interconnectedness of Gothic methodologies and medical humanities. Northanger Abbey was written in a period when women’s reading habits was a contested topic, so I will provide a quick historical overview of the period and the problematic Gothic novel, which Northanger Abbey satirizes. Where previous research has focused on Catherine Morland, the protagonist and ‘misreader’ in this Gothic satire, this article will focus on Austen’s feminized hero, Henry Tilney, and read him in the role of a mesmeric healer. His goal is to cure Catherine of her obsession with Gothic novels, in order for her to fulfil the feminine ideal of the time. The mesmeric method is to produce a crisis in the patient, however, I will show how Henry’s plan fails and he inadvertently produces a crisis in himself, and forces him to realize the extent of his own ‘reading illness’. He is ‘infected’ by the masculine literary canon, which in his mind entails literary superiority over Catherine and his sister Eleanor.

Storytelling as therapy is a term that connects literature and trauma into a method of organizing experience. My analysis will focus on a selection of dialogue between the main characters and Henry’s monologues, to highlight where Austen’s hero is compelled to take narrative control as a way to control his own trauma; his troubled relationship with his father and the death of his mother.