Can I read Illness as Narrative (Composition, Literacy, and Culture) on EtoBox?

Illness as Narrative (Composition, Literacy, and Culture) by Ann Jurečič is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

What is Illness as Narrative (Composition, Literacy, and Culture) about?

<p>For most of literary history, personal confessions about illness were considered too intimate to share publicly. By the mid-twentieth century, however, a series of events set the stage for the emergence of the illness narrative. The increase of chronic disease, the transformation of medicine into big business, the women's health movement, the AIDS/HIV pandemic, the advent of inexpensive paperbacks, and the rise of self-publishing all contributed to the proliferation of narratives about encounters with medicine and mortality.<br> While the illness narrative is now a staple of the publishing industry, the genre itself has posed a problem for literary studies. What is the role of criticism in relation to personal accounts of suffering? Can these narratives be judged on aesthetic grounds? Are they a collective expression of the lost intimacy of the patient-doctor relationship? Is their function thus instrumental—to elicit the reader's empathy?<br> To answer these questions, Ann Jurecic turns to major works on pain and suffering by Susan Sontag, Elaine Scarry, and Eve Sedgwick and reads these alongside illness narratives by Jean-Dominique Bauby, Reynolds Price, and Anne Fadiman, amon

Author

Ann Jurečič

Publisher

University of Pittsburgh Press

Published

2012

Language

EN

ISBN

9780822961901