Ebook: Illness as Many Narratives: Arts, Medicine and Culture

Explores the aesthetic, ethical and cultural importance of contemporary representations of illness across different arts and media

Illness narratives have become a cultural phenomenon in the Western world but their analysis continues to be framed by the context of biomedicine, the doctor–patient encounter and the demands of medical training. This reductive and instrumental attitude prevents the inclusion of more formally experimental genres, different themes and interdisciplinary methods within the field. It also perpetuates the view of the medical humanities as a narrow area of study largely serving the needs of medicine.

Approaching illness and its treatments as a multiplicity and situating them in relation to aesthetics, theory, radical pedagogy, politics and contemporary cultural concerns, Bolaki offers close readings of autobiographical and collaborative works across a wide range of arts and media. Through case studies on photography, artists’ books, performance art, film, theatre, animation and online narratives, Illness as Many Narratives demonstrates how bringing in diverse materials and engaging with multiple perspectives can help the arts, cultural studies and the medical humanities to establish critical conversations and amplify the goals and scope of their respective work.

Key Features

• Opens up the category of illness narrative to consider a wide variety of media/artistic forms beyond literature
• Intervenes in current debates in medical humanities/medical education by emphasising more critical as opposed to instrumental approaches
• Explores different physical and mental illness experiences in both autobiographical and collaborative/relational narratives
• Offers new close readings of diverse works by Sam Taylor-Wood, Martha Hall, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Wim Wenders, Lisa Kron and others