{"title":"Love in the Time of Polio: Sound, Sickness, and Stigma in Philip Roth's <i>Nemesis</i>.","authors":"Bronwen McVeigh","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Philip Roth's novel Nemesis follows Jewish gym teacher Bucky Cantor as he unravels in the wake of a polio epidemic. Barred from fighting in WWII due to poor eyesight, Bucky attempts to atone for this self-perceived failure of masculinity by acting as a rational, masculine-coded voice quelling \"hysterical\" noise. However, Bucky's decision to leave his post catalyzes a crisis of identity when polio follows him in his retreat. As he draws closer to his \"destiny\" of self-imposed exile, I show how his attitudes about music, sound, and silence parallel his shifting sense of self. By denying himself the pleasure of listening to music he once loved-by embracing the silence of social alienation rather than the bustle of community engagement-Bucky becomes a character in a self-determined tragedy, destroying any chance for restitution in his life story.</p>","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":"43 2","pages":"522-545"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148200409","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"What Has Become of Henry Johnson? Disability, Monstrosity, and Personhood in Stephen Crane's \"The Monster\".","authors":"Melissa Ryan","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This essay explores Crane's novella through the lens of disability studies, examining in both historical and theoretical terms how disability is made monstrous. The question of Henry Johnson's personhood-whether, burned faceless, he remains Henry Johnson-is at the center of both the nineteenth-century euthanasia debates the novella evokes and the uncanny encounter he represents for the community. If personhood is-philosophically and neurobiologically-a function of the story the self tells, then Henry Johnson is a man made of fragments, threatening to expose the fragility of the \"normal.\"</p>","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":"43 2","pages":"285-307"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148200457","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Shame, Enchantment, and the \"There-ness\" of Disability in <i>The Secret Garden</i>.","authors":"Harriet Cooper","doi":"10.1353/lm.2025.a975543","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2025.a975543","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden has been a repugnant object for contemporary scholars of disability studies because of the equivalence it draws between able embodiment and morality. While scholars have remarked on the novel's linguistic register of rectitude, few have focused on what it might mean to analyze The Secret Garden through the prism of shame. I attempt to develop such a reading here, exploring shame's textual and historical multivalence. I will ask: what is at stake-affectively and critically-in the practice of re-reading a novel that one experienced first in childhood? What is created, and what is effaced or over-written, in the temporal distance of adulthood and the critical distance afforded by a theoretical framework unavailable to the child?</p>","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":"43 1","pages":"52-74"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145702342","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Towards a Theory of Unexplained Illness: Shame, Pride, and Johanna Hedva's \"Sick Woman Theory\".","authors":"Maaike Hommes","doi":"10.1353/lm.2025.a975545","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2025.a975545","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article offers a reading of Johanna Hedva's \"Sick Woman Theory\" in relation to shame and pride in the context of unexplained illness-illness, that is, for which there is no found organic marker in relation to the symptoms experienced by the patient, and which is often chronic. People with unexplained illness find themselves without discursive backing and are especially prone to shame and stigmatization. Hedva politicizes their illness against the backdrop of a capitalist ideology, identifying chronic illness as a material-discursive phenomenon and uncoupling it from individual blame and responsibility. Bridging queer and crip discussions on shame and pride with approaches to illness within the medical humanities, I read Hedva's iconic \"Sick Woman Theory\" as an activist strategy for the emancipation of people with unexplained illness.</p>","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":"43 1","pages":"95-117"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145702410","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cultural Trauma Studies and Post-traumatic Protests.","authors":"Suzanne LaLonde","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The world is rife with protesters standing in defiance against war, sexism, racism, and social, economic, and environmental injustices. Could protests such as these represent post-traumatic expressions? Are they symptoms of traumatic experiences and/or therapeutic mechanisms to address trauma reverberating in conscious and unconscious realms? To address these questions, this article first demonstrates how the field of cultural trauma studies has focused on trauma to the neglect of more positive post-traumatic states. To address this gap and flesh out the concept of \"post-traumatic protests,\" I analyze metaphysical, aesthetic, and linguistic post-traumatic protests from world literature, arguing that these works appear to foster healing, resilience, resistance, and growth. These conclusions are informed by interdisciplinary research that combines perspectives from both the humanities and the sciences.</p>","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":"43 2","pages":"329-353"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148200459","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ecopathographies and Latinx Literature: Ecocritical Turns in Literature and Medicine and Medical/Health Humanities.","authors":"Geovani Ramírez","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In this project, I read Cherríe Moraga's acclaimed play Heroes and Saints as an ecopathography, a genre identified by Anne Hunsaker Hawkins, to illustrate how Latinx literary depictions of labor should be understood as creative, cultural, historical, and political enterprises rather than mere reports of farmwork sufferings. I suggest that the language of this subgenre classification (\"eco\" and \"pathography\") allows us to think simultaneously about ecologies and literature and health and debility-about the environmental humanities alongside the medical/health humanities. Informed by Rob Nixon's concept of slow violence and Thom Davies's slow observation as well as Stacy Alaimo's framework of trans-corporeality, this project joins scholars who seek to understand the experiences of environmental injustice among working-class Latinx people as well as learn from the embodied knowledge that Latinx populations have.</p>","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":"43 2","pages":"397-428"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148200462","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How to Be Happy in America: Clifford Whittingham Beers's <i>A Mind That Found Itself</i> and the Making of Mental Health.","authors":"Christian R Gelder","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Clifford Whittingham Beers's A Mind That Found Itself (1908) was the literary spark that inaugurated the amorphous mental hygiene movement in the first decades of the twentieth century. Despite the book's relative obscurity in discussions of American literature, historians of psychiatry still invoke the idea that it is an \"autobiography of genuine literary merit,\" suggesting that the link between the mental hygiene movement and the literary imaginary was not coincidental-it was constitutive. This paper provides a new aesthetic and political history of the idea of \"mental health,\" pushing back against the prevailing view that Beers's book is a well-meaning instance of turn-of-the-century liberal progressivism that prioritized the patient's voice. It argues that Beers and his mental hygiene movement instead localized the health of the nation in the individual's mental health, giving aesthetic form to later practices of bio-psychiatric nation-making.</p>","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":"43 2","pages":"500-521"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148200440","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Stories of Shame, Stories for Shame: Fiction and Self-harm.","authors":"Veronica Heney","doi":"10.1353/lm.2025.a975552","DOIUrl":"10.1353/lm.2025.a975552","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>That self-harm is a shameful practice is often taken for granted. However, recent sociological work has called attention to the way this shamefulness is actively constructed through narrative. This essay takes up that call, with a particular focus on fictional representations. It takes an interdisciplinary approach, weaving together a close reading of Tim Blake Nelson's 2015 film Anesthesia with data from interviews with people with experience of self-harm. Specifically, it attends to the location of shame in a \"type\" of self-harming character, the significance of visibility and exposure in narratives of self-harm, the function of genre in invoking or communicating shame, and the uncertain relationship between destigmatization and the enforcement of norms. It thus explores shame as contingent, relational, and actively brought into being.</p>","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":"43 1","pages":"241-264"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7618646/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145702335","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"A World of Unknowing\": Facing Shame in Lucy Grealy's <i>Autobiography of a Face</i>.","authors":"Harriet Hustis","doi":"10.1353/lm.2025.a975546","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2025.a975546","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Situated at the intersection of literature and medicine, Autobiography of a Face offers a unique opportunity to explore the interrelationship of shame and illness. By interleaving what Grealy thought she knew with what she later learned (but still struggles to comprehend), Autobiography of a Face represents shame as a kind of epistemological fall, the leap from a world of unknowing that Grealy takes as she looks back at her experience of life-altering illness. In her autobiographical account, Grealy examines what it means to literally and figuratively \"face\" shame-to both acknowledge and give expression to it in the aftermath of pediatric cancer and recovery.</p>","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":"43 1","pages":"118-133"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145702226","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}