Do liminal embodied experiences such as illness, death and dying affect literary form? In recent years, the concept of embodiment has been theorized from various perspectives. Gender studies have been concerned with the cultural implications of embodiment, arguing to move away from viewing the body as a prediscursive phenomenon to regarding it as an acculturated body. Age studies have extended this view to the embodied experience of ageing, while drawing attention to the ways in which the ageing body, through its materiality and plasticity, restricts the possibilities of (de)constructing subjectivity. These current debates on embodiment find a strong counterpart in literary representation. The contributions to this anthology investigate how and to what extend physical borderline experiences affect literary form.
Price: $35.00
Pages: 260
Publisher: transcript publishing
Imprint: transcript publishing
Series: Aging Studies
Publication Date:
27 August 2019
Trim Size: 8.86 X 5.83 in
ISBN: 9783837643060
Format: Paperback
»Each of the articles that compose the collection invites the readers into a nuanced analysis of protagonists who live through intense pain and illness, highlighting the potentialities of language as well as the contradictions that arise inside the same protagonists between their failing bodies, their selves and societys expectations.«
Heike Hartung is an independent scholar who has earned her PhD in English studies at Freie Universität Berlin and her PhD habil. at Universität Potsdam, Germany. She is affiliated as senior researcher at the Center for Inter-American Studies at Universität Graz, Austria. In her publications she applies the methods of literary theory and cultural studies to the interdisciplinary fields of ageing, disability and gender studies. She is a founding member of the European Network in Aging Studies (ENAS).
Frontmatter 1
Content 5
Acknowledgements 7
Introduction: The Concept of Embodiment in Modern Culture 9
Embodied Narrations of the End of Life: Toward A Thanatological Biopolitics of Modern Culture 21
'About Suffering They were Never Wrong, The Old Masters': Human Pain and the Crucible of Representation 51
How We Imagine Living with Dying 67
Disgust in Samuel Beckett's Molloy 85
'Blue with Age': Dis- and Dys-appearance of the Body in Eudora Welty's "A Worn Path" 103
Growing Bodies: Narrating Death and Sexuality in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction 119
When Mother Is Dying: Miljenko Jergovi's Kin 141
Storytelling in the Age of AIDS: Narrative Possibilities and the Exigencies of Loss in Dale Peck's Martin and John. A Novel 157
Realism and the Soul: The Philosophy of Virginia Woolf's Illness 177
The Illness Is You: Figurative Language in David Foster Wallace's Short Story "The Planet Trillaphon" 203
Reading the Assault on the Lived Body in Hilary Mantel's Giving up the Ghost 227
Contributors 255
