Illness as Many Narratives

Dr Stella Bolaki is Senior Lecturer in American Literature in the School of English at the University of Kent. She is the author of Unsettling the Bildungsroman: Reading Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction (Rodopi, 2011) and the co-editor, with Chris Gair of Disability and the American Counterculture, a special issue of the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies (forthcoming, 2015), co-editor, with Sabine Broeck, of Audre Lorde's Transnational Legacies (University of Massachusetts Press, forthcoming, 2015), and co-editor, with Derek Ryan, of Contradictory Woolf: Selected Papers from the Twenty-first Annual International Virginia Woolf Conference (Clemson University Digital Press, 2012).

• Acknowledgements; Introduction: Illness as Many Narratives; 1. Re-Covering Scarred Bodies: Reading Photography; 2. Artists’ Books in the Medical Community; 3. Performance Medicine and Radical Pedagogy; 4. Collaborative Film as Terminal Care; 5. Messy Confrontations: Theatre and Expert Knowledge; 6. Animated Documentary and Mental Health; Afterword: #Illness; Bibliography; Index.

In this book's examples, we can see what we already know but often ignore: that no patient’s illness experience happens in a vacuum, or, perhaps even more importantly, within a medical bubble. The artistic forms are of great importance because they are related to questions of ethics and politics that explore the many "metastasised" conflicts around illness. Stella Bolaki presents the patient (perhaps for some uncomfortably so) as a complex, lively, and creative being. She convincingly works out what her "emergent narratives" can do better than other word-based narratives: they solicit dialogues and shape perceptions in a much more public and political way.