Download or read book Unfitting Stories written by Valerie Raoul and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2007-03-30 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unfitting Stories: Narrative Approaches to Disease, Disability, and Trauma illustrates how stories about ill health and suffering have been produced and received from a variety of perspectives. Bringing together the work of Canadian researchers, health professionals, and people with lived experiences of disease, disability, or trauma, it addresses central issues about authority in medical and personal narratives and the value of cross- or interdisciplinary research in understanding such experiences. The book considers the aesthetic dimensions of health-related stories with literary readings that look at how personal accounts of disease, disability, and trauma are crafted by writers and filmmakers into published works. Topics range from psychiatric hospitalization and aestheticizing cancer, to father-daughter incest in film. The collection also deals with the therapeutic or transformative effect of stories with essays about men, sport, and spinal cord injury; narrative teaching at L’Arche (a faith-based network of communities inclusive of people with developmental disabilities); and the construction of a “schizophrenic” identity. A final section examines the polemical functions of narrative, directing attention to the professional and political contexts within which stories are constructed and exchanged. Topics include ableist limits on self-narration; drug addiction and the disease model; and narratives of trauma and Aboriginal post-secondary students. Unfitting Stories is essential reading for researchers using narrative methods or materials, for teachers, students, and professionals working in the field of health services, and for concerned consumers of the health care system. It deals with practical problems relevant to policy-makers as well as theoretical issues of interest to specialists in bioethics, gender analysis, and narrative theory. Read the chapter “Social Trauma and Serial Autobiography: Healing and Beyond” by Bina Freiwald on the Concordia University Library Spectrum Research Repository website.
Download or read book Boom written by Julie Rak and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2013-06-15 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the early 1990s, tens of thousands of memoirs by celebrities and unknown people have been published, sold, and read by millions of American readers. The memoir boom, as the explosion of memoirs on the market has come to be called, has been welcomed, vilified, and dismissed in the popular press. But is there really a boom in memoir production in the United States? If so, what is causing it? Are memoirs all written by narcissistic hacks for an unthinking public, or do they indicate a growing need to understand world events through personal experiences? This study seeks to answer these questions by examining memoir as an industrial product like other products, something that publishers and booksellers help to create. These popular texts become part of mass culture, where they are connected to public events. The genre of memoir, and even genre itself, ceases to be an empty classification category and becomes part of social action and consumer culture at the same time. From James Frey’s controversial A Million Little Pieces to memoirs about bartending, Iran, the liberation of Dachau, computer hacking, and the impact of 9/11, this book argues that the memoir boom is more than a publishing trend. It is becoming the way American readers try to understand major events in terms of individual experiences. The memoir boom is one of the ways that citizenship as a category of belonging between private and public spheres is now articulated.
Download or read book Ordinary Wonders written by Olesia Nikolaeva and published by Holy Trinity Publications. This book was released on 2018-04-01 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Deceitful Onion Bulb. A Blessing to Smuggle. The Conjuror of Rain. In this collection of stories as whimsical as their titles, award-winning author Olesia Nikolaeva poignantly recounts life for Christian believers in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. In a manner reminiscent of the bestselling Everyday Saints these tales reveal a common theme - the subtle, sometimes imperceptible movement of Divine Providence at work in the lives of saints and sinners alike. Her writings bring us to what the ancient Celts called "thin places" where the boundaries of heaven and earth meet and the sacred and the secular can no longer be distinguished.
Download or read book Second Wind written by M. Festle and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-02-14 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book uses both oral and conventional historical methods to describe and analyze the history of lung transplantation in the US. While drawing on accounts from doctors and other specialists, it primarily focuses on the experiences of patients and explores themes of uncertainty, timing, identity, coping, and quality of life.
Download or read book Counting Our Losses written by Darcy L. Harris and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-01-19 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text is a valuable resource for clinicians who work with clients dealing with non-death, nonfinite, and ambiguous losses in their lives. It explores adjustment to change, transition, and loss from the perspective of the latest thinking in bereavement theory and research. The specific and unique aspects of different types of loss are discussed, such as infertility, aging, chronic illnesses and degenerative conditions, divorce and separation, immigration, adoption, loss of beliefs, and loss of employment. Harris and the contributing authors consider these from an experiential perspective, rather than a developmental one, in order to focus on the key elements of each loss as it may be experienced at any point in the lifespan. Concepts related to adaptation and coping with loss, such as resilience, hardiness, meaning making and the assumptive world, transcendence, and post traumatic growth are considered as part of the integration of loss into everyday life experience.
Download or read book Memory and Latency in Contemporary Anglophone Literature written by Yvonne Liebermann and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-06-06 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Up until fairly recently, memory used to be mainly considered within the frames of the nation and related mechanisms of group identity. Building on mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, this form of memory focused on the event as a central category of meaning making. Taking its cue from a number of Anglophone novels, this book examines the indeterminate traces of memories in literary texts that are not overtly concerned with memory but still latently informed by the past. More concretely, it analyzes novels that do not directly address memories and do not focus on the event as a central meaning making category. Relegating memory to the realm of the latent, that is the not-directly-graspable dimensions of a text, the novels that this book analyses withdraw from overt memory discourses and create new ways of re-membering that refigure the temporal tripartite of past, present and future and negotiate what is ‘memorable’ in the first place. Combining the analysis of the novels’ overall structure with close readings of selected passages, this book links latency as a mode of memory with the productive agency of formal literary devices that work both on the micro and macro level, activating readers to challenge their learned ways of reading for memory.
Download or read book Telling the Flesh written by Sonja Boon and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2015-09-01 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the second half of the eighteenth century, celebrated Swiss physician Samuel Auguste Tissot (1728-1797) received over 1,200 medical consultation letters from across Europe and beyond. Written by individuals seeking respite from a range of ailments, these letters offer valuable insight into the nature of physical suffering. Plaintive, desperate, querulous, fearful, frustrated, and sometimes arrogant and self-interested in tone, the letters to Tissot not only express the struggle of individuals to understand the body and its workings, but also reveal the close connections between embodiment and politics. Through the process of writing letters to describe their ailments, the correspondents created textual versions of themselves, articulating identities shaped by their physical experiences. Using these identities and experiences as examples, Sonja Boon argues that the complaints voiced in the letters were intimately linked to broader social and political discourses of citizenship in the late eighteenth century, a period beset with concerns about depopulation, moral depravity, and corporeal excess, and organized around intricate rules of propriety. Contributing to the fields of literary criticism, history, gender and sexuality studies, and history of medicine, Telling the Flesh establishes a compelling argument about the connections between health, politics, and identity.
Download or read book Reconsidering Intellectual Disability written by Jason Reimer Greig and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 2015-11-02 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the controversial case of “Ashley X,” a girl with severe developmental disabilities who received interventionist medical treatment to limit her growth and keep her body forever small—a procedure now known as the “Ashley Treatment”—Reconsidering Intellectual Disability explores important questions at the intersection of disability theory, Christian moral theology, and bioethics. What are the biomedical boundaries of acceptable treatment for those not able to give informed consent? Who gets to decide when a patient cannot communicate their desires and needs? Should we accept the dominance of a form of medicine that identifies those with intellectual impairments as pathological objects in need of the normalizing bodily manipulations of technological medicine? In a critical exploration of contemporary disability theory, Jason Reimer Greig contends that L'Arche, a federation of faith communities made up of people with and without intellectual disabilities, provides an alternative response to the predominant bioethical worldview that sees disability as a problem to be solved. Reconsidering Intellectual Disability shows how a focus on Christian theological tradition’s moral thinking and practice of friendship with God offers a way to free not only people with intellectual disabilities but all people from the objectifying gaze of modern medicine. L'Arche draws inspiration from Jesus's solidarity with the "least of these" and a commitment to Christian friendship that sees people with profound cognitive disabilities not as anomalous objects of pity but as fellow friends of God. This vital act of social recognition opens the way to understanding the disabled not as objects to be fixed but as teachers whose lives can transform others and open a new way of being human.
Download or read book Adopted Women and Biological Fathers written by Elizabeth Hughes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adopted Women and Biological Fathers offers a critical and deconstructive challenge to the dominant notions of adoptive identity. The author explores adoptive women’s experiences of meeting their biological fathers and reflects on personal narratives to give an authoritative overview of both the field of adoption and the specific history of adoption reunion. This book takes as its focus the narratives of 14 adopted women, as well as the partly fictionalised story of the author and examines their experiences of birth father reunion in an attempt to dissect the ways in which we understand adoptive female subjectivity through a psychosocial lens. Opening a space for thinking about the role of the discursively neglected biological father, this book exposes the enigmatic dimensions of this figure and how telling the relational story of 'reconciliation' might be used to complicate wider categories of subjective completeness, belonging, and truth. This book attempts to subvert the culturally normative unifying system of the mother-child bond, and prompts the reader to think about what the biological father might represent and how his role in relation to adoptive female subjects may be understood. This book will be essential reading for those in critical psychology, gender studies, narrative work, sociology and psychosocial studies, as well as appealing to anyone interested in adoption issues and female subjectivity.
Download or read book The Wounded Self written by Nina Schmidt and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2018 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Takes the recent wave of German autobiographical writing on illness and disability seriously as literature, demonstrating the value of a literary disability studies approach.
Download or read book Disability Incarcerated written by L. Ben-Moshe and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-05-29 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disability Incarcerated gathers thirteen contributions from an impressive array of fields. Taken together, these essays assert that a complex understanding of disability is crucial to an understanding of incarceration, and that we must expand what has come to be called 'incarceration.' The chapters in this book examine a host of sites, such as prisons, institutions for people with developmental disabilities, psychiatric hospitals, treatment centers, special education, detention centers, and group homes; explore why various sites should be understood as incarceration; and discuss the causes and effects of these sites historically and currently. This volume includes a preface by Professor Angela Y. Davis and an afterword by Professor Robert McRuer.
Download or read book Narrative Medicine Trauma and Ethics written by Anders Juhl Rasmussen and published by Vernon Press. This book was released on 2024-05-14 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new volume repositions narrative medicine and trauma studies in a global context with a particular focus on ethics. Trauma is a rapidly growing field of especially literary and cultural studies, and the ways in which trauma has asserted its relevance across disciplines, which intersect with narrative medicine, and how it has come to widen the scope of narrative research and medical practice constitute the principal concerns of this volume. This collection brings together contributions from established and emerging scholars coming from a wide range of academic fields within the faculty of humanities that include literary and media studies, psychology, philosophy, history, anthropology as well as medical education and health care studies. This crossing of disciplines is also represented by the collaboration between the two editors. Most of the authors in the volume use narrative medicine to refer to the methodology pioneered by Rita Charon and her colleagues at Columbia University, but in some chapters, the authors use it to refer to other methodologies and pedagogies utilizing that descriptor. Trauma is today understood both in the restricted sense in which it is used in the mental health field and in its more widespread, popular usage in literature. This collection aspires to prolong, deepen, and advance the field of narrative medicine in two important aspects: by bringing together both the cultural and the clinical side of trauma and by opening the investigation to a truly global horizon.
Download or read book Staying with the Trouble written by Donna J. Haraway and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-25 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the midst of spiraling ecological devastation, multispecies feminist theorist Donna J. Haraway offers provocative new ways to reconfigure our relations to the earth and all its inhabitants. She eschews referring to our current epoch as the Anthropocene, preferring to conceptualize it as what she calls the Chthulucene, as it more aptly and fully describes our epoch as one in which the human and nonhuman are inextricably linked in tentacular practices. The Chthulucene, Haraway explains, requires sym-poiesis, or making-with, rather than auto-poiesis, or self-making. Learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying together on a damaged earth will prove more conducive to the kind of thinking that would provide the means to building more livable futures. Theoretically and methodologically driven by the signifier SF—string figures, science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism, speculative fabulation, so far—Staying with the Trouble further cements Haraway's reputation as one of the most daring and original thinkers of our time.
Download or read book Reading and Writing Experimental Texts written by Robin Silbergleid and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays offers twelve innovative approaches to contemporary literary criticism. The contributors, women scholars who range from undergraduate students to contingent faculty to endowed chairs, stage a critical dialogue that raises vital questions about the aims and forms of criticism— its discourses and politics, as well as the personal, institutional, and economic conditions of its production. Offering compelling feminist and queer readings of avant-garde twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts, the essays included here are playful, performative, and theoretically savvy. Written for students, scholars, and professors in literature and creative writing, Reading and Writing Experimental Texts provides examples for doing literary scholarship in innovative ways. These provocative readings invite conversation and community, reminding us that if the stakes of critical innovation are high, so are the pleasures.
Download or read book Literary and Visual Representations of HIV AIDS written by Aimee Pozorski and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-11-06 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary and Visual Representations of HIV/AIDS: Forty Years Later depicts how film and literature about the HIV/AIDS crisis expand upon the issues generated by the epidemic. This collection fills an important gap in the scholarship on HIV/AIDS, by bringing together essays by both established and junior scholars on visual and literary representations of HIV/AIDS. Almost forty years after the first reported cases of what would later be defined as AIDS, this book looks back across the decades at works of literature and film to discuss how the representation of HIV/AIDS has shifted in media. This book argues that literature constitutes a very powerful response to AIDS that ripples into film and politics, driving the changes in past and contemporary representations of HIV/AIDS. The book also expands discussion of the issues generated and amplified by the epidemic to consider how HIV/AIDS has been portrayed in the United States, Western and Southern Africa, Western Europe, and East Asia.
Download or read book Life Writing and Schizophrenia written by Mary Elene Wood and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2013-09-05 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do you write your life story when readers expect you not to make sense? How do you write a case history that makes sense when, face to face with schizophrenia, your ability to tell a diagnostic story begins to fall apart? This book examines work in several genres of life writing–autobiography, memoir, case history, autobiographical fiction–focused either on what it means to live with schizophrenia or what it means to understand and ‘treat’ people who have received that diagnosis. Challenging the romanticized connection between literature and madness, Life Writing and Schizophrenia explores how writers who hear voices and experience delusions write their identities into narrative, despite popular and medical representations of schizophrenia as chaos, violence, and incoherence. The study juxtaposes these narratives to case histories by clinicians writing their encounters with those diagnosed with schizophrenia, encounters that call their own narrative authority and coherence into question. Mary Wood is the author of The Writing on the Wall: Women’s Autobiography and the Asylum (University of Illinois Press, 1994) and has published articles on autobiography, case history, literature and psychiatry, and narrative ethics in Narrative, British Journal of Medical Ethics, Journal of Trauma and Dissociation, and American Literary Realism. She teaches in the English Department at the University of Oregon.
Download or read book Voices of Mental Health written by Martin Halliwell and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-02 with total page 601 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dynamic and richly layered account of mental health in the late twentieth century interweaves three important stories: the rising political prominence of mental health in the United States since 1970; the shifting medical diagnostics of mental health at a time when health activists, advocacy groups, and public figures were all speaking out about the needs and rights of patients; and the concept of voice in literature, film, memoir, journalism, and medical case study that connects the health experiences of individuals to shared stories. Together, these three dimensions bring into conversation a diverse cast of late-century writers, filmmakers, actors, physicians, politicians, policy-makers, and social critics. In doing so, Martin Halliwell’s Voices of Mental Health breaks new ground in deepening our understanding of the place, politics, and trajectory of mental health from the moon landing to the millennium.
