Aesthetics Of Illness Research Articles

Corporeality in Contemporary Iraqi Fiction

The aesthetics of corporeality in post-2003 Iraqi fiction shows a development in perceiving the body both artistically and as a cultural sign. Corporeality is envisioned here on two levels: the first entails corporeality of the text as a dialectic space for the embodiment of corporeal experience. The second, involves the representation of the body as a technique to redefine and question corporeal and sexual identities. This article suggests that this new perception of corporeality indicates a new gaze towards the body in contemporary Iraqi fiction, manifested in: first, the dialectic relation between fragmented narration and fragmented corporeality as an embodiment of annihilation in a post-invasion and war context; second, the aesthetics of illness and disability as a mechanism to question normative bodies and to voice subaltern corporeality; finally, corporeal gender politics which build a novel perception of sexuality.

Contemporary Artists\u2019 Books and the Intimate Aesthetics of Illness

This essay brings together critical perspectives from the discrete traditions of artists’ books and the medical humanities to examine artists’ books by three contemporary artists – Penny Alexander, Martha A. Hall and Amanda Watson-Will – that treat experiences of illness and wellbeing. Through its focus on a multimodal and multisensory art form that has allegiances with, but is not reduced to, narrative, the essay adds to recent calls to rethink key assumptions of illness narrative study and to challenge utilitarian approaches. In particular, it draws attention to the aesthetic and imaginative elements of illness communication by exploring how artists’ books represent lived experiences in a distinctively palpable way and offer an “intimate authority” that extends beyond narrative legitimacy or a form of struggle against the medical gaze. By interrogating narrative’s dominance in medical humanities research, the essay further expands awareness of illness experiences that resist conventional forms of representation (such as chronic illness), and of alternative reflective practices within healthcare education that encourage engagement with both mind and body.

Illness as Metaphor

The late British artist Donald Rodney (1961–98) developed a unique vocabulary critiquing wider representations of the black male body that extended beyond his status as a person living with sickle cell disease to the lives of others with a shared racial background. Critical yet full of wit, Rodney was, until his death in 1998 from complications related to sickle cell disease, one of the most compelling artists to come out of the Black Arts Movement of 1980s Britain. From X-rays of his cells to tiny sculptures made from his own skin, Rodney created conceptual self-portraits of his life as a young black man. This article considers illness, art, and activism while reflecting on the effects of living with sickle cell disease and the continued invisibility around this illness, both on the African continent and beyond for the very reasons Rodney’s works highlight. In focusing on the notion of illness as metaphor in art and analyzing the metaphorical tropes of illness present in Rodney’s artworks produced during the late 1980s to early 1990s, the author’s intention is to think through the entangled understandings of illness and masculinity to seek new readings of Rodney’s works. The artist’s deeply moving, conceptual, and critically engaging oeuvre not only confronts the viewer with both the presence and absence of the black male body, but also presents the spectator with the realities of the artist’s daily negotiations living with sickle cell disease. This disease affects people of African, Caribbean, Eastern Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and Asian descent, and there is still no cure for it. It is a “black” disease that raises polemics of care toward black bodies and the invisibility of sufferers within the wider medical discourse. Rodney’s works form a compelling case for an artist’s dedication to making both him and his works visible while simultaneously acting as a form of resistance against marginalization and oppression on the basis of both race and gender. Rodney’s practice is considered here within wider discourses dealing with a postcolonial reading of pain, aesthetics of illness, and representations of the male body.

The aesthetics of illness: narrative, horror and the sublime

First‐person accounts of life‐threatening or terminal illness appear frequently in the academic literature and in the media. This paper takes up the question of how these accounts might provide, for their authors, a sense of coherence and freedom, and for their readers a grasp of suffering and its potential. By focusing upon the ‘horrors’ integral to such accounts, the argument is made that such horrors are basic to the sufferer’s symbolisation of an illness‐world. This world, rather like the adventure, is torn from life, grounded in the sensuous fragments through which its elusory powers are expressed. Seen as the problematisation of life as a work of freedom, the illness account can then be analysed as an aesthetic project. The paper discusses this proposal, distinguishing between aesthetics and aestheticisation as social phenomena. It uses this distinction to make a critical observation upon attempts to understand suffering in the modern world in terms of power or of myth.

Of Sapho and Syphilis: Alphonse Daudet on and in Illness

THE INTERACTION between literature and medicine has a long history, with Apollo, god of medicine and poetry, as its titular deity, and yet, as G. S. Rousseau has pointed out, medicine has long been omitted from the cultural debate. * Interestingly, many fewer patients than doctors have written about illness,2 with the perhaps inevitable result that for both writers and readers there has been a concern with the processes of infection, contagion and healing and with the thematics of suffering rather than with the poetics of illness. The Aristotelian association of art with catharsis has tended to dominate consideration of literary and artistic texts, and, indeed, from Aeschylus onwards, western culture has privileged the notion of pathei mathein (suffering alone teaches), thereby making of illness an ethical and epistemolA³gica! phenomenon and ensuring that the aesthetics of illness (or, at least, its representation) remains a largely unexplored area. Before the nineteenth century, the literary function of illness was generally thematic, advancing narrative development or serving to comment on a character's personality or moral make-up. In the nineteenth century, however, hospital and laboratory medicine became more sophisticated and widespread in France, and in 1880 Zola set out his concepts of naturalism in Le Roman expA©rimental, which is explicitly and repeatedly indebted to the physiologist Claude Bernard's L'Introduction A la medicine expA©rimentale (1865), the classic manifesto of nineteenthcentury scientific medicine. Although Balzac, Flaubert, the Goncourts and Stendhal all included descriptions of illness and suffering in their works, Zola surpassed all of them in his detailed chronicling of a range of diseases from anthracosis to peritonsilar abscess, smallpox and wound sepsis. There is, however, one singular medical absence in Zola and gen

Body and Emotion: The Aesthetics of Illness and Healing in the Nepal Himalayas

Body and Emotion: The Aesthetics of Illness and Healing in the Nepal Himalayas. ROBERT R. DESJARLAIS. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. xiii + 300 pp., illustrations, notes, photographs, glossary, references, index.

Body and Emotion: The Aesthetics of Illness and Healing in the Nepal Himalayas. Robert Desjarlais

<b>Body and Emotion: The Aesthetics of Illness and Healing in the Nepal Himalayas</b>. <i>Robert Desjarlais</i>

Body and Emotion: The Aesthetics of Illness and Healing in the Nepal Himalayas. Robert R. Desjarlais

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsBody and Emotion: The Aesthetics of Illness and Healing in the Nepal Himalayas. Robert R. Desjarlais Sherry B. OrtnerSherry B. Ortner Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by History of Religions Volume 34, Number 3Feb., 1995Image and Ritual in Buddhism Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/463401 Views: 2Total views on this site Copyright 1995 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Body and emotion: The aesthetics of illness and healing in the Nepal Himalayas

Body and emotion: The aesthetics of illness and healing in the Nepal Himalayas

: Body and Emotion: The Aesthetics of Illness and Healing in the Nepal Himalayas . Robert R. Desjarlais.

: Body and Emotion: The Aesthetics of Illness and Healing in the Nepal Himalayas . Robert R. Desjarlais.

Body and Emotion: The Aesthetics of Illness and Healing in the Nepal Himalayas

Body and Emotion is a study of the relationship between culture and emotional distress, an examination of the cultural forces that influence, make sense of, and heal severe pain and malaise. In order to investigate this relationship, Robert R. Desjarlais served as an apprentice healer among the Yolmo Sherpa, a Tibetan Buddhist people who reside in the Helambu region of north-central Nepal.

Body and emotion: the aesthetics of illness and healing in the Nepal Himalayas

Body and emotion: the aesthetics of illness and healing in the Nepal Himalayas