The Literacy of Pain

Abstract

Following H. L. Goodall Jr.'s call to employ narrative ethnography to help re-establish “the centrality of personal experience and identity in the social construction of knowledge,”1 this essay examines one scholar's efforts to identify with her student, Anna, during her battle with terminal Ewing's Sarcoma. Using performative writing and the lenses of literary devices and relief humor, we seek mechanisms for grappling with the complexities of life and death: labeling devices and tropes, using what we know to figure out what we do not know, and thinking critically and reflexively.