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How do you write your life story when readers expect you not to make sense? How do you write a case history that makes sense when, face to face with schizophrenia, your ability to tell a diagnostic story begins to fall apart? This book examines work in several genres of life writing–autobiography, memoir, case history, autobiographical fiction–focused either on what it means to live with schizophrenia or what it means to understand and ‘treat’ people who have received that diagnosis. Challenging the romanticized connection between literature and madness, Life Writing and Schizophrenia explores how writers who hear voices and experience delusions write their identities into narrative, despite popular and medical representations of schizophrenia as chaos, violence, and incoherence. The study juxtaposes these narratives to case histories by clinicians writing their encounters with those diagnosed with schizophrenia, encounters that call their own narrative authority and coherence into question.
Borderlines. Autobiography and Fiction in Postmodern Life Writing locates and investigates the borderlines between autobiography and fiction in various kinds of life-writing dating from the last thirty years. This volume offers a valuable comparative approach to texts by French, English, American, and German authors to illustrate the different forms of experimentation with the borders between genres and literary modes. Gudmundsdóttir tackles important contemporary concerns such as autobiography’s relationship to postmodernism by investigating themes such as memory and crossing cultural divides, the use of photographs in autobiography and the role of narrative in life-writing. This work is of interest to students and scholars of comparative literature, postmodernism and contemporary life-writing.
This book is an examination of South African mental institutions and policy from 1939-1994. It examines how racial, gender and sexual discrimination affected practitioners' views and practices, and also reveals the role that patients and international events played in shaping mental health policy.
In light of materialist revisions of the Cartesian dual self and the increased recognition of memoir and autobiography as a crucial cultural index, the physical body has emerged in the last twenty-five years as an increasingly inescapable object of inquiry, speculation, and theory that intersects all of the various subgenres of life writing. New Essays on Life Writing and the Body thus offers a timely, original, focused, and yet appropriately interdisciplinary study of life writing. This collection brings together new work by established authorities in autobiography, such as Timothy Dow Adams, G. Thomas Couser, Cynthia Huff, and others, along with essays by emerging scholars in the field. Su...
Highlights the ways in which the emotional life, identity formation and the relationship between self and society can inform histories both of individuals and of nations.
The first comprehensive guide to the burgeoning field of women's autobiography. Essays from 39 prominent critics and writers explore narratives across the centuries and from around the globe. A list of more than 200 women's autobiographies and a comprehensive bibliography provide invaluable information for scholars, teachers, and readers.
'Oh that I had wings I would fly like a dove and be at rest I would fly out of this asylum ....' So wrote Ralph M., a patient at the Toronto Hospital for the Insane from 1889 until his death in 1911. Winston O., another inmate at the Toronto asylum, actually sought to build wings like Ralph so longed for. After crafting violins that he played and building from scratch an automobile he was allowed to drive on the hospital grounds, Winston was reported to be working on the construction of an 'aeroplane'. In Remembrance of Patients Past, historian Geoffrey Reaume chronicles seventy years of daily life at the institution known as 999, the Toronto Hospital for the Insane at 999 Queen Street West....
This is a provocative look at writing by and about people with illness or disability—in particular HIV/AIDS, breast cancer, deafness, and paralysis—who challenge the stigmas attached to their conditions by telling their lives in their own ways and on their own terms. Discussing memoirs, diaries, collaborative narratives, photo documentaries, essays, and other forms of life writing, G. Thomas Couser shows that these books are not primarily records of medical conditions; they are a means for individuals to recover their bodies (or those of loved ones) from marginalization and impersonal medical discourse. Responding to the recent growth of illness and disability narratives in the United St...
Although scholars in the environmental humanities have been exploring the dichotomy between "wild" and "built" environments for several years, few have focused on the field of disability studies, a discipline that enlists the contingency between environments and bodies as a foundation of its scholarship. On the other hand, scholars in disability studies have demonstrated the ways in which the built environment privileges some bodies and minds over others, yet they have rarely examined the ways in which toxic environments engender chronic illness and disability or how environmental illnesses disrupt dominant paradigms for scrutinizing "disability." Designed as a reader for undergraduate and g...
The prisons and asylums of Canada and the United States were a popular destination for institutional tourists in the nineteenth-century. Thousands of visitors entered their walls, recording and describing the interiors, inmates, and therapeutic and reformative practices they encountered in letters, diaries, and articles. Surprisingly, the vast majority of these visitors were not members of the medical or legal elite but were ordinary people. Prisons, Asylums, and the Public argues that, rather than existing in isolation, these institutions were closely connected to the communities beyond their walls. Challenging traditional interpretations of public visiting, Janet Miron examines the implications and imperatives of visiting from the perspectives of officials, the public, and the institutionalized. Finding that institutions could be important centres of civic activity, self-edification, and 'scientific' study, Prisons, Asylums, and the Public sheds new light on popular nineteenth-century attitudes towards the insane and the criminal.