Between Virginia Woolf’s pronouncement that no great literature of illness exists and Henry James’ late contention that sickness offers for the writer the “shortest of all cuts to the interesting state,” we have a possible range of literary responses to illness. But bodies and disease are not just socially contested discursive formations, they are determined by the constraints of biological reality. The experience of illness, from autism to cancer, comes to life in this intersection of “medical fact” and representational value. Through the reading of literary accounts of illness and illness narratives as conceived by patients, physicians and professional writers, we will develop a language and theoretical framework to explore the relation between culture and medicine in the construction of the sick body and self.
To highlight these reciprocal relations, we will examine the scientific and representational meanings of concepts like contagion, vaccination, genetic transmission and transplantation in the works of Mary Shelley, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Mann, William Gibson and Kazuo Ishiguro in addition to illness memoirs by Susanne Antonetta, Emmanuelle Laborit and Paul Monette.
