Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Women’S Resistance: Patient Pathographies And Medical Authority, Anna Claire Elliott

Honors Theses

In recent years, illness narratives have risen in popularity. Women’s medical narratives in particular have gained momentum in the literary world, and they often share commonalities including the inherent theme of medical resistance and an emphasis on the power dynamic between patients and physicians. This thesis will examine two pathographies, Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted and Porochista Khakpour’s Sick, in the contexts of gender and disability studies, as well as theories of illness narratives. I examine how each text resists medical authority, and I also closely survey the physician-patient relationships within each text. The themes of gender and disability emerge …

Bodies Unbroken: Disability In Indra Sinha's Animal's People And Katherine Dunn's Geek Love, Hannah C. Baker

Honors Theses

This project explored the representation of physical disability in modern fiction with the hope to prove that disabled characters are receiving more complex and complete treatment in fiction as a reflection of social change, progress that is also supported by the growing field of disability scholarship. I will explore how two contemporary novels depart from older conventions of representing the disabled as static symbols of good or evil or as broken persons who need to be fixed. Scholars in both English and Disability Studies have commented on these problems, and their insights informed my argument.

Furthermore, I will explore the …

Out Of The Attic: Agency And Narratives Of Mental Illness By David Foster Wallace And Lauren Slater, Erin L. Mcleod

Honors Theses

Studies of Prozac Diary and Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir illustrate how Slater adapts conventions of fiction to the memoir form to create agency for the mentally ill subject. This study will apply this approach of narrative therapy to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest to determine if the autobiographical conventions of mental illness may be adapted to fiction. An analysis of these primary texts seeks to address issues related to the therapeutic dimensions of autobiography as these are complicated by the narrative conventions that distinguish memoir and fiction.