LITERATURE AND MEDICINE最新文献

{"title":"The Pain of Residential Schools in Canada: An Analysis of Silence and Narrative","authors":"Wade Paul","doi":"10.1353/lm.2023.a921567","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2023.a921567","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>In operation for over a century, the Indian Residential School system is a painful part of Canadian history. Through the theoretical approaches to pain envisioned by Elaine Scarry, Javier Moscoso, and Ilit Ferber, this article examines how the pain of residential school experiences manifests as silence among residential school survivors. Through a close analysis of narratives that break free from that silence, it becomes apparent that narrative offers one path to national reconciliation. While arguing in favor of narrative as a path towards national reconciliation, this article cautions readers against reducing residential school narratives to a form of trauma spectatorship.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":"14 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140129446","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":"Guest Editor's Introduction: Pain's Plurals and Narrative Disruption: Communicating Pain and Honoring Its Telling","authors":"Sara Wasson","doi":"10.1353/lm.2023.a921562","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2023.a921562","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;span&gt;&lt;span&gt;In lieu of&lt;/span&gt; an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:&lt;/span&gt;\u0000&lt;p&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; Guest Editor's Introduction:&lt;span&gt;Pain's Plurals and Narrative Disruption: Communicating Pain and Honoring Its Telling&lt;/span&gt; &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Sara Wasson (bio) &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;em&gt;How to narrate an illness&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;em&gt;in fairer climates and&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;em&gt;to fair-weather figures&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;span&gt;*&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;em&gt;How not to&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt; —&lt;em&gt;Amy Allara&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Pain may be a wind, a mist, live burial, a rubbish tip, a concrete suit, shattered glass, a knife.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; Discussions of pain can readily become a list of the vivid metaphors created as people reach for language in extremity.&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; Each of these metaphors—and this entire theme issue—is an example of the way pain generates words: it inspires telling. Yet despite such an abundance of language, a refrain of \"invisibility\" remains disturbingly prevalent in the lived experience of many people with pain, both mental and physical (and indeed pain problematizes that divide in multiple ways). This introduction to this issue will review and contextualize relevant recent debates in the cultural studies of pain. One of my primary aims in curating this issue is to acknowledge that insofar as pain experience poses challenges to representation, that is less a function of any intrinsic unspeakability of pain, and more of a varying cultural &lt;em&gt;legibility&lt;/em&gt; of pain. Expectations of illness story—in the sense of both the events and the narrative of those events, the way they are told—has a direct impact on what kinds of pain experience &lt;strong&gt;[End Page 283]&lt;/strong&gt; can most readily be heard, and who is heard. Cultural contexts and expectations of illness story influence what can be heard in pain, what can be known about it, and who is respected as knowing. These are matters of epistemic justice.&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Each article in this issue examines writing which brings pain vividly to life, and shows how a particular telling of pain requires unsettling certain conventions of writing or illness expression. While narratology notes the difference between story (events, plot) and narrative (the telling of those events), the essays in this issue are less concerned with precise narratological anatomization of narrative, and more interested in the cultural work done &lt;em&gt;by&lt;/em&gt; narratives, by the telling of events within specific forms.&lt;sup&gt;5&lt;/sup&gt; Writing pain may require disruptions, textual experimentation and the breaching of cultural expectations of what narratives should do and who should tell them.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Pain takes many forms and has many temporalities. In the form of \"chronic\" or persistent pain, for example, it affects over 20 percent of all adults in the US, and for 12 percent of those people the pain severely impacts multiple parts of their life.&lt;sup&gt;6&lt;/sup&gt; Global estimat","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":"508 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140129404","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":"Crime Fiction and the Knowing of Pain","authors":"Susannah B. Mintz","doi":"10.1353/lm.2023.a921573","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2023.a921573","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>Recent studies of pain have disputed the idea that pain eludes representation in language. Where these have largely focused on the <i>experience</i> of pain, my paper examines the epistemological <i>function</i> of pain in crime fiction, a genre that by definition foregrounds meaning: what and how we know. A good crime story depends structurally on resolution, but its pleasure derives more thoroughly from suspense. Pain would seem to defy those logics; surely we long for its ending, not its persistence. Yet many contemporary detectives do their work in pain, embodying an impossible contradiction between chaos and order. This suggests that pain is somehow integral to the process of knowing, inviting us to rethink pain as disrupting rather than constituting the forward motion of meaning.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140129409","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":"Strange and Tender Fracture: Flash Illness Writing, Chronic Pain, and Alternatives to \"Resilience\"","authors":"Sara Wasson","doi":"10.1353/lm.2023.a921571","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2023.a921571","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>How might flash writing be useful in communicating chronic pain? This question drove the UKRI AHRC-funded project <i>Translating Chronic Pain</i> at Lancaster University (2017–2019), which focused on the potential of fragmentary, episode-driven forms. This article examines how the ultra-short form and navigation architectures of the <i>Translating Pain</i> online anthology facilitate a polyphony of responses to pain that neither deny the validity of distress nor make recovery a solitary, individual act. The anthology's polyphony of voices encompasses a broad register of affects and, at times, offers a commitment to the inconclusive—to ambivalent and unfinished experiences of pain, without moving too quickly to culturally sanctioned closures of optimism or individual overcoming.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":"87 4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140129401","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":"\"Your Tiny White Vests, Unworn\": Contemporary Elegies of Maternal Loss","authors":"Anne Whitehead","doi":"10.1353/lm.2023.a921568","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2023.a921568","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>This essay asks whether poetry can articulate the experience of maternal loss, paying particular attention to questions of form. Focusing on two British poetry collections, Rebecca Goss's <i>Her Birth</i> (2013) and Karen McCarthy Woolf's <i>An Aviary of Small Birds</i> (2014), I argue that the contemporary elegy is currently being reshaped to explore the grief of losing a baby, and to bear witness to a life briefly lived. Drawing on Caroline Levine's emphasis on the affordances of form, the essay first examines these elegies' aural qualities thorugh the motif of the echo. Next I attend to the shaping of the poems, and how their word placement gives weight to the experience of baby loss. Finally, I consider how the modes of address at the end of the two collections negotiate the possibility of moving forward.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140129430","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":"Essaying Pain","authors":"Ann Jurecic","doi":"10.1353/lm.2023.a921565","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2023.a921565","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>Narrative has long been central to the study of literature about illness, but we err if we assume that memoir and fiction alone depict the embodied experience of physical suffering. Contemporary writers also turn to the essay. In French, <i>essayer</i> means to attempt, and writing essays requires facing difficult questions and predicaments, confronting uncertainty and the unknown. Among recent literary essays, many are about women in pain. These include Eula Biss's \"The Pain Scale\" (2005) and Leslie Jamison's \"Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain\" (2014). Each of these writers asks: How, when, and why do we suffer? Why is women's pain so often diminished, dismissed, and misunderstood? And why, in response to the suffering of others, do we regularly fail to provide what is needed?</p></p>","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140129397","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":"Vehement Experiences: The Inscription and Description of Delusion in Nineteenth-century French Asylums","authors":"Javier Moscoso","doi":"10.1353/lm.2023.a921572","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2023.a921572","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>This essay explores the differences in the narrative forms of mental illness, depending on whether the sources consulted come from published medical histories or archival material. Based on the study of dozens of clinical cases contained in, above all, the institutions of Charenton and Bicêtre, from the late eighteenth century to the 1850s, I argue that the distinctive feature of the clinical case was vehemence rather than delirium. My methodological approach is based on the conceptualization of the forms of experience proposed by the philosopher of history Reinhart Koselleck.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":"31 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140129474","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":"Staying with Narrative: Stories of Shame and Gynecological Pain","authors":"Katharine Cheston","doi":"10.1353/lm.2023.a921569","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2023.a921569","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>Storytelling is good for us—or so we are told. This article examines two memoirs, by Hilary Mantel and Susanna Kaysen, in which narrating experiences of gynecological pain provokes shame and deepens pain. By attending to shame as a textual presence, I intervene in a longstanding debate about how to make sense of pain and illness. Shame, I argue, reveals the presence of multiple (and often contrasting) illness <i>narratives</i>; I analyze these narratives, and their interplay, across Mantel's and Kaysen's memoirs. As scholarship moves beyond, past, or post-narrative, I urge us to stay: to interrogate the ways in which illness narratives interact—amplifying some stories and storytellers whilst fragmenting or silencing others—and to examine the responsibility we all have within this collective sense-making.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140129408","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":"Authoring Pain: Fragmentation and Autofiction in Maggie Nelson's Bluets","authors":"Maria Vaccarella","doi":"10.1353/lm.2023.a921570","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2023.a921570","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>This article analyzes Maggie Nelson's <i>Bluets</i> (2009) as a prominent example of the fragmentary narration that can result from the experience of pain and loss. I demonstrate how Nelson's disparate ruminations on her obsession for the color blue, her heartbreak, and her quadriplegic friend's chronic pain defy the superimposition of a teleological plot over these experiences, in favor of episodic reading and sporadic not-knowing. Still, the autofictional nature of the text—with its alternatively overbearing and elusive authorial presence—challenges any naïve emotional investment in it. Focusing on Nelson's narration of her quadriplegic friend's experience of chronic pain, I conclude by highlighting how <i>Bluets</i> calls for a reconsideration of the reader's stance vis-à-vis the description of suffering, as well as of simplistic critical approaches to illness narratives as life-writing.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":"10 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140129328","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":"Attending Pain, Ethnographically","authors":"Megan Crowley-Matoka","doi":"10.1353/lm.2023.a921574","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2023.a921574","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>What might ethnography—as both practice and text—offer for thinking about and with non-narrative forms of pain representation? Ethnography operates as an inherently fragmentary, episodic form of knowledge-making: the central acts of observing and writing social life rest upon moments plucked and crafted from the unruly, relentless rush of intersubjective experience. Bringing an ethnographic sensibility to bear on clinical encounters around pain thus attunes us to both the partiality and the sociality of representation. Drawing from ongoing research into how clinicians encounter patients' pain, here I hold together two ethnographic moments, reading across them to explore the consequential forms of attention and of representation at work in the ephemeral utterances and exchanges of everyday work in clinical settings.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":44538,"journal":{"name":"LITERATURE AND MEDICINE","volume":"77 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140129400","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}