Let’s Fight? Metaphors in Illness Narratives
Tuesday, 18 October 2022, 6 pm
Room SZ15.21, RESOWI Center, Universitätsstraße 15, Bauteil A, 2nd floor
Registration until 15 October to cirac(at)uni-graz.at
The struggling metaphor, as noted by Susan Sontag in her widely read study, "Illness as Metaphor," is one of the most widely used, and perhaps most criticized, metaphors for experiencing illness. Nevertheless, sufferers and medical staff continue to use them. Renowned authors such as Siri Hustvedt, Audre Lorde and David Foster Wallace, who deal with illnesses, “fight” against migraines, cancer and depression in their autobiographical texts. But fight is not the same as fight.
Because metaphors enable a variety of strategies of alternative use, new use, recycling and creative misuse - practices that can be traced in autobiographical texts and transferred to everyday (medical) life. After a brief presentation of the book Metaphor in Illness Writing: Fight and Battle Reused (2022), we will follow examples from medical practice together with the author Anita Wohlmann and rethink established metaphors in a new and different way.
Anita Wohlmann is Associate Professor of Contemporary Anglophone Literature at the University of Southern Denmark, where she conducts research at the Center for Uses of Literature. In addition to American literature, she teaches courses and workshops in narrative medicine and is a founding member and coordinator of the German Network for Narrative Medicine, established in 2019. Her research focuses on metaphors, age and aging, narratives of illness, life writing, disability and serial narration.
N.B. The lecture will be held in German.