Elpub

This paper explores the possibilities of a historical narratology of the life sciences – by analysing exemplary articles of two leading scientific journals of 19th century Germany. Strikingly, the old tradition of constituting scientific knowledge through first-person narrative persists into the early…

The claim that literary fiction is a valuable source of knowledge can be confronted with the following skeptical objection: on a standard account of the conditions for both the possession and transmission of knowledge, fiction cannot be considered a source of knowledge, for we are not justified in believing…

Andrea Voß: Reisen erzählen. Erzählrhetorik, Intertextualität und Gebrauchsfunktionen des adligen Bildungsreiseberichts in der Frühen Neuzeit. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter 2016 (= Neue Bremer Beiträge 20). 349 S. EUR 45,00. ISBN 978-3-8253-6591-2

Illness requires narration: it fulfills a crucial role in the cooperation between patient and doctor, is demanded by one’s social environment, and emerges in the identity work triggered by a medical diagnosis (which in itself constitutes a first narrative model for the ill person to accept, rework or…

Around 1900 a wide range of self-help books adopt the tendency among laymen medical practitioners to denounce the sole authority of the medical establishment to cure mental and physical dysfunctions related to the so called „Zeitkrankheit“ of neurasthenia. In different autobiographical case narratives…

“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, [...], is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling” (Burke 1958, 36), writes Edmund Burke 1757 in A Philosophical…

‘Graphic medicine’ or ‘graphic pathography’, a subgenre of the autobiographical comic, enables patients or caregivers to relate personal encounters with disease, mostly to process these experiences. When I set out to create the graphic narrative Wij twee samen (“Us Two Together”, 2015), which deals with…

The importance of complex illness themes, in particular those of mental illness, has already been emphasized in numerous scientific articles regarding the literary work of Georg Büchner. It is particularly evident that Büchner draws on his medical knowledge into the literary text. In Lenz (1835) he experiments…

The Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) is a canonical text for many including its portrayals of illness. This article explores the narrative representation of illness in three longer narratives in the Hebrew Bible by means of a close reading. The narratives are all legends of some sort and involve terminal…

Focusing on the concepts of narrative empathy and recognition, this article aims to explore ways in which personal narratives may promote a renewed perception of illness and disability. Taking its cue from studies by Rita Felski (2008) and Suzanne Keen (2013), it investigates how empathic experience…