Freedom

Metagnosis ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 298-328
Author(s):  
Danielle Spencer
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Medicine ◽  
Cultural Discourse ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
Literature And Medicine ◽  
Representational Practices ◽  
Literary Movements ◽  
Zadie Smith ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter returns to the narrative medicine methodology discussed in Chapter 2, elaborating upon the relationship between literature and medicine and proposing that metagnosis is the key to making a readerly/writerly diagnosis. As literary movements such as metafiction expose the fallacies and limitations of literary realism, metagnosis constructively exposes the representational practices of biomedicine. The confluence of metagnosis and metareferentiality is explored in the work of contemporary comedian Hannah Gadsby. In addition, the implications of metagnosis are shown to extend beyond the context of health and medicine to revelations concerning identity (e.g., Dani Shapiro’s Inheritance) and to the cultural discourse of identity writ large (e.g., Appiah, Haider, Zadie Smith). Understanding metagnosis as a revelation effecting a change in knowledge—and employing our blindsight to address the apparent binaries structuring our understanding—is integral to our understanding of ourselves and of identity itself as we move into an increasingly dynamic future.

Spaces of Consumption in American Literary Realism

2019 ◽  
pp. 391-410
Author(s):  
Gary Totten
Keyword(s):  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
Natural Environments ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
New Strategies

This chapter discusses how consumer culture affects the depiction and meaning of the natural world in the work of American realist writers. These writers illuminate the relationship between natural environments and the social expectations of consumer culture and reveal how such expectations transform natural space into what Henri Lefebvre terms “social space” implicated in the processes and power dynamics of production and consumption. The representation of nature as social space in realist works demonstrates the range of consequences such space holds for characters. Such space can both empower and oppress individuals, and rejecting or embracing it can deepen moral resolve, prompt a crisis of self, or result in one’s death. Characters’ attempts to escape social space and consumer culture also provide readers with new strategies for coping with their effects.

scholarly journals Narrative medicine in medical diagnosis

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Raúl Pino Andrade
Keyword(s):  
Interpersonal Relationships ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Narrative Medicine ◽  
Medical Field ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Historical Periods ◽  
A Current ◽  
Made In

Modernity has brought with it a series of scientific advances that, in the medical field, have improved not only the diagnosis and treatment of diseases, but also the quality of life of patients. This is undeniable. It is enough to carry out an exercise of imagination and place our life in two different historical settings: first the Renaissance, and second the XXI century or contemporary era. Leaving cultural or historical affinities aside, to the question: In which of these historical periods would you like to live? The most prudent answer is very likely: now, in this century. The advances of medicine can be traced historically, we cannot think about it without thinking in Vesalius, or Paré, and many others; however, it is true that the history of medicine accelerated markedly in the 20th century. Although it is true that in just over a hundred years the greatest scientific discoveries have been made in all fields of knowledge, modernity has also meant a change in time itself. Everything unfolds at previously unimaginable speeds: material and knowledge production, teaching and learning, communication and interpersonal relationships. The latter point should be highlighted, and the changes due to the acceleration of the relationship between doctors and their patients should be pointed out on time. It is as if life should climb the assembly line and obey a Fordist logic. It must be recognized that the acceleration of certain aspects is significant, such as the expansion of diagnostic tests, creation of procedures and medications, immediate response to emergencies, among others. But all these advantages seem to carry with them, as a current, all areas of life including what must necessarily be paused.

Lives after Life

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helena Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Modern Culture ◽  
Literary Movements ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter explores the relationship between translations of Ovid’s poetry and arguments about literary taste. Its premise is that translations were part of wider cultural and literary movements; and prefatory material, particularly characterizations of the author, functioned programmatically to introduce and situate the ensuing translation. The chapter focuses on three distinctive moments of translation: the renditions of Ovid of the 1620s, the burlesque versions of the 1650s, and the galant translations of the last third of the century. It demonstrates that they were variously engaged with different forms of cultural confrontation, not only between ancient and modern culture, but also, in the earlier decades particularly, between France and Italy, and later with the tensions both caused by and within the aesthetic and cultural mode of galanterie; it explores how they use portrayals of Ovid to engage in such confrontation.

“They’re the Ones Chasing the Cougar”: Relationship Formation in the Context of Age-Hypogamous Intimate Relationships

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 463-485 ◽  
Author(s):  
Milaine Alarie
Keyword(s):  
Intimate Relationships ◽  
Formation Process ◽  
Cultural Discourse ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Relationship Formation ◽  
Men I ◽  
Younger Men ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Relationship

Commonly referred to as “cougars,” women who date younger men are often imagined as sexually assertive women who actively seek out and seduce younger men, therefore challenging major pillars of the traditional heterosexual dating script. Drawing on 55 semi-structured interviews with women aged 30-60 who date younger men, I explore the relationship formation process women experienced with younger men with the intent of shedding light on women’s behavior in that context. I found that, contrary to common cultural representations of “cougars,” very few women depicted themselves as seductresses who pursued younger men, with younger men passively waiting to be courted. However, the tendency to present oneself as having played a rather passive role during the relationship formation process was more pronounced among participants over 40 than among 30-something women. I argue that in the context of age-hypogamous dating, women’s ability/desire to renegotiate the gendered script for relationship formation is constrained by the common cultural discourse indicating that a woman’s worth declines with age, as well as by the cultural discomfort toward older women’s sexuality.

Brand believers : reconciling journalistic and organizational identity at a city magazine

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Joy M. Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Organizational Identity ◽  
Ethnographic Case Study ◽  
University Of Missouri ◽  
Staff Members ◽  
Representational Practices ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
Civic Capital ◽  
The University ◽  
The Relationship

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] This dissertation uses an ethnographic case study to examine the perspectives and representational practices of local journalists through a case study of an award-winning city magazine, D Magazine in Dallas, Texas. The study assessed how staff members discursively constructed their journalistic identity within a geographically focused media organization. The study also considered the relationship between journalistic identity and organizational identity by addressing how the staff members described their surrounding community and their organization's function within it as well as how those understandings shaped D and its members. Lastly, the study used field theory to address how external and internal influences on newswork informed staff members' ideologies, routines, and perceptions of D's local function. The findings suggest that staff members operated within a networked hierarchy through which they collaborated both within individual publications and across departments while also fulfilling corporate needs for entrepreneurship and innovation. Within this environment, staff members balanced journalistic- and audience-oriented editorial emphases through reinforcing a city-magazine mentality that dictated and legitimized topic selection and content approaches. Lastly, the study recognized how D attracted and engaged various forms of capital while also shifting its focus to amassing civic capital as a means of manifesting its local agenda in tangible ways.

Poetics of Palliation

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Birttany Pladek
Keyword(s):  
Medical Ethics ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Mary Shelley ◽  
Literature And Medicine ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
John Gregory

In the past twenty years, health humanists and scholars of literature and medicine have drawn on Romantic ideas to argue that literature can cure spiritual ills by making sufferers feel whole again. But this model oversimplifies the relationship between literature and pain, perpetuating a distorted picture of how Romantic writers thought literature addressed suffering. The Poetics of Palliation documents how writers like William Wordsworth and Mary Shelley developed more complex, palliative forms of literary medicine: therapies that stressed literature’s manifold relationship to pain and its power to sustain, comfort, and challenge even when cure was not possible. The book charts how Romantic writers developed these palliative poetics in conversation with their medical milieu. British medical ethics was first codified during the Romantic period. Its major writers, John Gregory and Thomas Percival, endorsed a palliative mandate to compensate for doctors’ limited curative powers. Similarly, Romantic writers sought palliative approaches when their work failed to achieve starker curative goals. The startling diversity of their results illustrates how palliation offers a more comprehensive metric for literary therapy than the curative traditions we have inherited from Romanticism.

Epilogue

2020 ◽  
pp. 254-272
Author(s):  
Jerome Tharaud
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
William Apess ◽  
Conservation Movement ◽  
Phillis Wheatley ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter looks beyond the American Civil War to consider the ways evangelical space continued to shape how Americans saw the landscape and themselves in literary realism to the conservation movement. It mentions how Mark Twain became a representative figure of how a secularizing America remained haunted by a sense of sacred presence rooted in the soil itself. It reviews the story about the rise of white Protestant evangelicals within U.S. national culture and how their form of evangelical space became American space by the eve of the Civil War. The chapter explores the ironic story about how evangelical space escaped control as writers and artists from other traditions reconfigured the relationship between landscape representation, media, and the sacred to produce their own apocalyptic geographies. It recounts how William Apess, Frederick Douglass, Phillis Wheatley, Robert S. Duncanson, and Henry Obookiah appropriated and adapted evangelical space.

The Novel in the Era of Plessy

2019 ◽  
pp. 15-86
Author(s):  
Christine Holbo
Keyword(s):  
Henry James ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
Sentimental Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Uncle Tom's Cabin ◽  
Literature And Philosophy ◽  
The Relationship

The transformation of literary realism in the late nineteenth century took place within the context of a categorical shift in American social epistemologies. The first chapter presents an interdisciplinary, generational portrait of this shift by examining a set of key texts from the years 1896–98 as summaries of the reconstruction of law, literature, and philosophy since the Civil War. Two important works by the James brothers, philosopher William James’s “The Sentiment of Rationality” and Henry James’s What Maisie Knew, demonstrate how the relationship between “sentiment” and “rationality” had been transformed. By attacking the nineteenth century’s trust in the emotions alongside its belief in a transcendent concept of reason, William and Henry James made a case for a new kind of moral imagination grounded in the uncertainty of the emotions and the unknowability of other selves. While the James brothers greeted the collapse of the sentimental paradigm as an emancipatory moment for individuals and for the novel itself, the lawyer and novelist Albion Tourgée saw it as imperiling the ability of Americans to speak, write, or think about freedom. Best known as Homer Plessy’s lawyer in Plessy v. Ferguson, Tourgée was also the most passionate defender of the emancipatory role of the sentimental novel. Exploring Tourgée’s opposition to pluralistic relativism in his brief on behalf of Homer Plessy and his literary analysis of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, this chapter explores the opposition between the Jameses’ celebratory vision of epistemological perspectivalism and Tourgée’s defense of sentimental reason.

RESISTANCE TO THE GILDED AGE: ROBERT HERRICK'S RADICAL MIDDLE CLASS

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-162
Author(s):  
Brynnar Swenson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
The Social ◽  
Economic Trends ◽  
Social Totality ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Precarious Situation

Often overlooked, Robert Herrick (1868–1938) was an experimental novelist who produced a sustained and critical engagement with the economic, political, and aesthetic effects of unregulated capitalist expansion in the late nineteenth century. Focusing onThe Web of Life(1900) andTogether(1908), this essay argues that Herrick's novels forcefully document a radical middle-class political position and demonstrate how the middle class was capable of apprehending and resisting the functionings of capitalism—especially its fragmentation of lived experience and its foreclosure of any practical exterior to the social totality. Given how recent economic trends toward deregulation and privatization have resulted in a precarious situation for the middle class worldwide, Herrick's depiction of the emergence of the modern middle class in 1890s Chicago also presents a dynamic foil from which to view our present moment. Though his genre-bending and politically ambiguous literary and political experiments have long contributed to critical confusion and even dismissal of his work, today Herrick's novels are a powerful tool for rethinking the long-accepted understanding of the relationship between literary realism, the struggles surrounding the emergence of corporate capitalism, and the political standpoint of the professional middle class.

Narrative Medicine for Healthcare Providers: Improving Practices of Advance Care Planning

2021 ◽  
pp. 003022282110155
Author(s):  
Cara L. Wallace ◽  
April Trees ◽  
Jennifer Ohs ◽  
Leslie Hinyard
Keyword(s):  
End Of Life ◽  
Advance Care Planning ◽  
Healthcare Providers ◽  
Narrative Medicine ◽  
Treatment Preferences ◽  
Active Listening ◽  
Care Planning ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
Advance Care ◽  
The Relationship

Advance care planning (ACP) conversations about treatment preferences and end-of-life goals relate to positive outcomes for patients and families, though ongoing barriers exist. Additionally, providers personal discomfort and personal experiences may influence how they engage (or avoid) ACP conversations. Narrative medicine (NM) offers one approach to help practitioners develop ability to hear and understand the story of others in ways that may overcome barriers to quality conversations. This study investigated the effectiveness of a 3-hour NM workshop to develop communication skills around ACP and facilitate reflection on the relationship between personal experiences and professional practices in ACP and end-of-life care. Twenty-five participants completed post-assessments of the workshop. Key themes included increased awareness, improved skills for active listening and eliciting stories, and improved understanding of how personal experiences shape professional practice. Results indicate practitioners value the NM approach to ACP suggesting this approach may provide impactful change in practice.

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