Dr.
University of Kent
Date: Wednesday 24 April 2013
Time: 2.15pm–3.45pm
Place: Eden 109, Liverpool Hope University, UK
Dr. Stella Bolaki uses a recent memoir, Patrick and Henry Cockburn’s Henry’s Demons: Living with Schizophrenia, A Father and Son’s Story (2011), as a vehicle to address broader theoretical inquiries and cultural debates related to the study of illness narratives, disability studies, and approaches to mental health. Reading the book as a collaborative narrative of illness, Dr. Bolaki starts by examining its formal composition and the ethical dimensions of collaborative life writing more generally. The rest of the paper assesses the strategies used in the memoir to construct a positive identity for the person who is ill and whether they have the capacity to reshape cultural knowledge and static models of schizophrenia that resort to either the pathologizing discourses of medicine or the metaphoric invocations of the “exceptional” schizophrenic (as in the work of the modernist avant-garde and some postmodern theorists, for example). Dr. Bolaki thus raises questions as to the kind of work illness narratives do for people who are ill and for those who seek to understand illness.
Stella Bolaki is a lecturer in the School of English at the University of Kent. Her publications in the field of disability studies and medical humanities include articles on race and disability, textual and photographic cancer narratives, illness and aesthetics, and artists’ books in the medical community. She is currently working on a monograph provisionally entitled Illness as Many Narratives: Aesthetics, Witnessing and the Politics of Representation.
For more information, please contact:
Dr. David Bolt
________________End of message________________
This Disability-Research Discussion list is managed by the Centre for Disability Studies at the University of Leeds (www.leeds.ac.uk/disability-studies).
Enquiries about list administration should be sent to [log in to unmask]
Archives and tools are located at: www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/disability-research.html
You can VIEW, POST, JOIN and LEAVE the list by logging in to this web page.
|