Pittsburgh series in composition, literacy, and culture
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Illness narratives and the challenge to criticism -- Life narratives in the risk society -- Responding to the pain of others -- Sontag, suffering, and the work of writing -- Theory's aging body -- Reparative reading.
0
"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? 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, among others. In the process, she defines the subgenres of risk and pain narratives and explores a range of critical responses guided, alternately, by narrative empathy, the hermeneutics of suspicion, and the practice of reparative reading."--Project Muse.
OverDrive, Inc.
JSTOR
0648F21D-E0E8-4309-9458-1C92E87EE872
22573/ctt5g6gw8
0822961903
American literature-- 20th century-- History and criticism.