Reading Closely: Bodies and Environments
Anna Ovaska and Kaisa Kortekallio examine the ways close reading can be used as a method for approaching vulnerable bodies and environments.
Neuromaani and the Poetics of Illness
Laura Piippo discusses the challenging poetics of illness in Jaakko Yli-Juonikas’s experimental novel.
Let’s Fight! Illness Metaphors and Their Many Uses
Anita Wohlmann considers how authors of illness narratives have consciously reworked the “fight” metaphor.
From Nobleness to Ugliness in Literary Illness Stories
Linda Nesby explores the emergence of the “ugly pathography” in contemporary Scandinavian illness narratives. Part of the SELMA Medical Humanities Seminar Series “Narratives of Illness”.
SELMA Medical Humanities: “Narratives of Illness” and “Indigenous Narratives of Health”
Marta-Laura Cenedese and Avril Tynan, convenors of the SELMA Medical Humanities Seminar Series at the University of Turku, Finland, reflect on the first season of the series, “Narratives of Illness”, and look ahead to a second season on “Indigenous Narratives of Healthcare”.
Mary Rose: The Wreckage of Chronic Illness
Novelist Sarah Marie Graye discusses how the Mary Rose ship helped her reconceive chronic illness and trauma
Sick: A Memoir
What hope is there for healing when the medical establishment views not your symptoms, but you yourself as the problem? Christy Zink reviews Sick: A Memoir (2018), Porochista Khakpour’s uncompromising account of her struggle
Anne Boyer’s “The Undying” (2/3)
The Polyphony asked two readers, Agnes Arnold-Forster (Research and Engagement Fellow, Surgery and Emotion, University of Roehampton) and Will Viney (Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths, UoL), to review Anne Boyer’s highly-publicised 2019 cancer memoir “The Undying”, and to respond to each other’s reviews. In this second of a three-part series, Will Viney considers Boyer’s text in the context of recent developments in ‘personalised’ cancer care.
Anne Boyer’s “The Undying” (1/2)
The Polyphony asked two readers, Agnes Arnold-Forster (Research and Engagement Fellow, Surgery and Emotion, University of Roehampton) and Will Viney (Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths, UoL), to review Anne Boyer’s highly-publicised 2019 cancer memoir “The Undying”, and to respond to each other’s reviews. In this first of a three-part series, Agnes Arnold-Forster discovers a text that explores poverty, politics and the provision of healthcare, and offers a critique of individualised illness narratives.
Reflections on Representing Pain: Narrative and Fragments
Chronic pain is in a state of representational crisis. That was how Sara Wasson opened the symposium, ‘Representing Pain: Narrative & Fragments’ at Lancaster University in August. Part of Wasson’s AHRC-funded network, Translating Chronic