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Illness As Metaphor? The Role Of Linguistic Categories In The History Of Medicine , Ulrike Kistner

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Susan Soniag's studies on "Illness and Metaphor" raise a host of questions, based on the twin suppositions running through her project: the ubiquity and pervasiveness of metaphoric constructions of illness on the one hand, and the vision of a liberation from metaphors of illness on the other hand. This paper sets itself the task to explain and resolve this paradox. To this end, concepts of metaphor have to be linguistically defined and differentiated, both structurally and within an archaeology of (medical) knowledge; for it is only on the basis of such a differentiation that we can show how metaphorical language …