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Dissertation Information for Lisa Diedrich

NAME:
- Lisa Diedrich

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- Women's Studies

SCHOOL:
- Emory University (USA) (2001)

ADVISORS:
- Cindy Patton

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Walter Kalaidjian
- Angelika Bammer

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: Treatments: Negotiating Bodies, Language, and Death in Illness Narratives

Abstract: The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate the phenomenological, psychological, and social meanings of illness as described in contemporary memoirs. I show the necessity of considering illness narratives as both effective and affective histories; that is, histories that are attentive both to the rhetoric and practice of politics as well as to the poetics and practice of suffering. This approach requires that I consider the texts, including Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals , Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors , Abraham Verghese's My Own Country , Rafael Campo's The Poetry of Healing , and Jean-Dominque Bauby's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly , not only as literary artifacts, but also as cultural artifacts, and to look beyond the texts themselves to critical and popular responses in reviews in particular and other media in general. My method for reading illness narratives is one that I call treatments , a term that has multiple meanings, including: "the process or manner of behaving towards or dealing with a person or thing"; "the application of medical care or attention to a patient, ailment, etc."; "a manner or instance of dealing with a subject or work of literature, art, etc."; and, perhaps most importantly, "discussion or arrangement of terms, negotiation." Taking into account all of these definitions, my treatments of illness narratives will negotiate the following questions: What sort of subject is formed in the practice of writing memoir in general, and illness narratives in particular? What sorts of knowledges are articulated in such writing? How are these knowledges different from expert medical knowledges, and are they capable of transforming expert medical knowledges? How does language both capture and fail to capture the "scenes of loss" portrayed in illness narratives? And, finally, what sort of ethics emerges out of such scenes of loss and the attempts to capture them in writing?

MPACT Scores for Lisa Diedrich

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-02-02 23:49:32

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