On_Culture Vol. 11 (2021)
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Auflistung On_Culture Vol. 11 (2021) nach Auflistung nach DDC "ddc:800"
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Item The illness of narrative: reframing the question of limits(2021) Greco, Monica; Stenner, PaulThis paper uses Dostoevsky s Notes from the Underground as the starting point for a critique of the assumption that engaging with narratives enhances well-being. While the limits of narrative have long been an object of critique by scholars in the medical humanities, the question of limits has been posed primarily in terms of whether nar-rativity can be considered an anthropological universal, and in terms of what (or whom) a privileging of narrativity might exclude. Through Dostoevsky, we reframe this problem by asking whether the construction of selves through narrative can and should be regarded as a healthy norm, even for those in whom this activity ap-pears to come naturally. Dostoevsky identified a dark side to the heightened con-sciousness associated with supposedly enlightened modern individuals. He critiques a tendency towards ever increasing abstraction from concrete existence and embodies this critique in the character of the underground man, a man plagued by sickness and distress, partly because he can only conduct his life on the basis of what he has read. The paper urges those working in the medical humanities today to formulate an adequate response to the paradoxes exhibited in Dostoevsky s great novel.Item Quarantined voices: on the transformative impact of COVID narratives at a time of crisis(2021) Wallace, Ann E.The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked new ways of not only gathering epidemiological information but also of telling the story of illness. In the early months of the pandemic, a collaborative relationship quickly developed out of necessity in the United States between medical professionals and those suffering with the novel disease, flattening the traditional hierarchy of the rhetorical doctor-patient relationship. COVID patients worked to correct the limited narrative that took root early in countries such as the United States and shared information, online and through patient-led research, of a relentlessly destructive disease. The author shares her experience as a long-haul COVID patient and analyzes the ways that patients have deployed a new illness narrative composed online in fragments by the very sick and marked by uncertainty and determination as a tool for gathering and sharing epidemiological information. Put simply, COVID patients, working online, in isolation and while acutely sick, have strategically used their stories to inform medical professionals and the public alike, and have created a new form of illness narrative in the process.Item Untenanted by any tangible form': illness, minorities, and narrative masquerades in contemporary pandemic fiction(2021) Däwes, BirgitIn the current Covid-19 crisis, masks have become a ubiquitous sight in social situa-tions. As visual signifiers of both protection and containment, they emblematize the very risk which they serve to prevent. Departing from the multiple functions of the mask in Edgar Allan Poe s The Masque of the Red Death a story published dec-ades before the emergence of modern virology this paper reads recent fictionaliza-tions of pandemics as diagnostic tools of larger social, political, and cultural shifts. Taking Poe s story as a programmatic blueprint, my interest is particularly in the cor-relation between (narrative) representation and political power in contexts of illness. Given that minorities are often disproportionally affected by, and blamed for, epidem-ics, my analysis targets not only the discursive and semantic strategies of outbreak narratives (Priscilla Wald), but the complicity of these strategies in notions of cultural difference. Through the trope of the mask, I argue, the nexus of the visible and invis-ible that Foucault sees at the heart of modern medicine can be reconceptualized along narratological lines. In addition to more detailed analyses of Ling Ma s Severance (2018) and Lawrence Wright s The End of October (2020), my reading of pandemic fiction also relies on novels by Michael Crichton, Philip Roth, Louise Erdrich, and Emma Donoghue, among others.