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Abstract
David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest has been at the centre of both a hyped-up reception as well as a backlash against its alleged status as the epitome of “bro-lit”. In recent years, an ever-growing body of scholarly literature on Wallace has increasingly turned to the novel’s relevance to therapeutic self-help cultures, Medical Humanities, and embodied cognition. In the novel, abnormal minds and bodies are the norm. In addition, all characters are in some way or another afflicted by conditions and mental struggles, leading up to addiction and a near-mythical search for the ultimate spiritual and/or corporeal satisfaction. So far, attention has mainly been paid to the at times grotesque physical and bodily impairments that pervade Infinite Jest. In contrast, our chapter shifts the focus to the topic of neurodiversity by focusing on phenomena like sensory processing differences, masking, hyperfocus, and eidetic memory. We argue that the novel renders palpable these less visible neurocognitive differences by engaging in crip humour. The novel does so by exposing the reader to the effects o, for example, severe distraction and hyperlexia to prefigure an enactive understanding of neurodiversity as a mismatch between an organism and its environment. Finally, we hypothesise that while Wallace engages in a broader social critique of American consumerist society, his usage of a very wry type of crip humour in the novel’s famous opening scene can also be shown to negotiate what it means to perceive the world by way of a very specific bodymind.
Abstract
During the 1960s, portrayals of altered, non-normative, consciousness became thematically key in exploring the intersection of social and psychological issues. In American science fiction, the depiction of altered states of consciousness, such as mental illness, dreams, and psychedelic drug trips, increased. Concurrently style shifted to a central concern of the genre as authors, editors, and academics began to perceive and promote the literary value of science fiction. This blended computational stylistic study describes styles of depicting altered consciousness in a corpus of award-winning American science fiction novels published between 1960 and 1969. Computational analysis with The Regressive Imagery Dictionary, a program that categorises the words of a text according to psychological paradigms, reveals lexical characteristics of style, and analysis guided by this dataset then interprets how stylistic detail creates distinct thematisations of altered states. The study aims to understand how nuances of word choice and sentence construction may affect how people conceptualize altered states, and how those notions affect, for example, treatment of the mentally ill. It poses the following questions: What linguistic strategies and semantic fields are used to represent altered states and how does the style of portrayal relate to the thematic import of altered consciousness? How do these themes affect, and how are they affected by, contemporaneous popular and professional attitudes towards mental illness? I demonstrate that stylistic differences in portraying altered states of consciousness at the lexical and syntactic level correspond to two distinct thematisations of altered states, which in turn are in dialog with contemporaneous socio-cultural currents. In one group the embodied style of altered consciousness gives rise to progressive themes of environmental and human interrelatedness, while through a style of movement and sensory prolixity, the second group portrays altered consciousness more conservatively as absence or chaos. This leads me to argue that the nuances of how we write about altered consciousness affects both societal understandings and how we regard and treat people undergoing such states.
Abstract
In contemporary literary works narrated by characters with Alzheimer’s Disease, unreliability takes new and unexpected turns that seem difficult to frame in the already existing categories. In this essay, I argue that narratives told by an autodiegetic narrator with Alzheimer’s Disease make use of a specific narrative mode that I define as “altered narration”. After a brief survey of the debate around both the text-oriented and cognitive-oriented approaches to unreliability, I zoom in what Marco Caracciolo defines as “strange narrators” and focus on narrators with Alzheimer’s Disease. Altered narration shifts the focus from the narrator to the neurological disease by which the narrator is affected, a disease that alters the narration. This narrative mode is inferable via the presence of three textual markers, namely the use of periphrases, self-doubting questions, and self-references, which highlight how the narrator is aware of their unreliability but fails to narrate otherwise. To illustrate altered narration, I examine the 2014 novel Elizabeth Is Missing by Emma Healey in which the autodiegetic narrator, Maud, investigates the alleged disappearance of her friend Elizabeth. In the analysis, I demonstrate how Maud’s narration does make her an unreliable narrator: her spatial-temporal perception, her memories intruding on her present, and the choice of a present tense narration give the reader not only a sense of the progressive worsening of her illness but also potential clues to Maud’s unreliability. However, through the textual markers present in the narrative – especially her self-doubting questions –the novel represents a valid instance of altered narration.
Abstract
Understanding the abstract in terms of the concrete is a primary function of metaphors in both speech and thought. This function is particularly prominent in autopathographies, in which writers face the challenge of delineating, narrating and explaining their highly subjective and complex illness experiences to readers that might have no first-hand experience of the author’s illness. As I will argue in this chapter, eating disorder narratives – a rather under-researched sub-genre of the autopathography – show a striking density of phenomenological metaphors that express the feeling tone, i.e. the sense of ‘what it is like’ to experience anorexia, bulimia, or binge-eating disorder. Tasked with granting the reader access to the atypical mind of the author’s experiencing self, this fascinating group of metaphors often draws on sensorimotor experiences of embodiment as source domains and has the potential to trigger embodied simulations in the reader. As research on mirror neurons suggests, embodied simulations are a crucial prerequisite for the development of empathetic responses to someone else’s pain, which is why these metaphors as simulation-facilitators play such a key role in the autopathographical communication of illness experience. They allow readers a more experiential – as opposed to a merely conceptual – understanding of the emotional pain, inner division, and loss of conscious control that characterise many experiences of eating disorders. In my discussion of the potential functions and effects of the phenomenological metaphors found in eating disorder memoirs, I draw on research conducted by neuroscientists and cognitive linguists on metaphor and narrative text comprehension. Additionally, I make use of the versatile toolkits provided by Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Blending Theory to analyse particular metaphors and their potential effects on readers in detail.
Abstract
The article traces some genealogies to understand the historical reasons behind the fact that sexual preferences which empirically are not unusual and not generally associated with impairment are perceived of as rare mental disorders in the most important psychiatric manuals as well as in colloquial language use. A special attention is given to “sadism” and “masochism, which as “clinical” terms are constituted from the names of literary authors. The article shows how deeply affected the conceptions of the real world preferences are by the events and characters in the fiction of these authors.
Abstract
The 2015 splatter film FRANK3N5T31N , directed by Bernard Rose, presents a contemporary adaptation of Mary Shelley’s famous 18th-century story, set in a futuristic Los Angeles. Rose’s adaptation of Shelley’s original focuses on the theme of the post-human “other” in the urban, late-capitalist context of the 21st century. This article investigates how the body contributes to the establishment of a stable sense of self in FRANK3N5T31N by way of embodied empiricism and mirroring practices. The creature, Adam, experiences the world via embodied empiricism and acquires the ability to behave and feel human, and to form a mind, by imitating those around him. His self-awareness and his consciousness are rooted in his body, but his body also serves as the site of his difficult existence as an outcast in his society. As such, embodiment is both symbol and cause of Adam’s dehumanisation. His rapidly deteriorating form is what marks him out for the regulatory and punitive gaze of a norm-bound society. Due to his appearance and the physical violence to which he is subjected, he is marked as a monster, something threatening and worthless, completely outside the realm of humanity. This marginalisation of the creature by human society culminates in a violent confrontation when the creature is brought face to face with the circumstances of his artificial creation and his lack of a unique body. While Adam’s physicality initially helps him perceive himself as an individual, it also becomes the cause of his loss of identity. FRANK3N5T31N thus depicts embodiment as both the source and the undoing of Adam’s mind, his humanity, and his personhood. Consequently, exploring the formation and negation of embodied subjectivity in FRANK3N5T31N offers insight into how othering processes operate. Kit Schuster investigates the role of embodied empiricism and othering in the creation of a stable subjectivity. In this modern film adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Gothic literature classic, the body acts as both a site of dehumanisation and a source of identity.