English Language and Literature Commons^™

Autopathography Across Media: Trauma And Fluid Embodied Subjectivity, He (Kristen) Shen

Honors Theses

Illness memoirs with first-person point of view have gained more attention in recent years among medical sociologists and anthropologists. Different from traditional “case histories”written by doctors that are in danger of ignoring patients’ voices, autopathograhical works delineate narrators’ transformative experiences of persons to patients, emphasizing the importance of gaining social understanding of illness. Focusing on three works within the category of autopathography across genres and media forms in the late 1950s and contemporary periods, The Cancer Journals (1980) written by Audre Lorde, The Collected Schizophrenias (2019) written by Esmé Weijun Wang, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) directed …

Autoimmunities After Covid: An Interview With Cindy Patton, Cindy Patton, Travis Alexander, Nishant Shahani

English Faculty Publications

Taken collectively, Patton’s scholarship and activism has laid the foundation for insights in the health humanities, particularly AIDS studies, that consider the inextricable connections between epidemiology and ideology. Patton’s theorizations of stigma and discrimination patterns, her deconstruction of “truth” discourses subtending science, her critical re-evaluations of axioms associated with risk, safe sex, community, and knowledge production have been crucial interventions in the understanding of health and illness as cultural and discursive scripts. Among Patton’s most enduring contributions has been her theorization of how “African AIDS” was invented and circulated—that is, the notion of geographically bifurcated HIV pandemics split by the …

Introduction: Autoimmunities In The Wake Of Covid-19, Travis Alexander, Nishant Shahani

English Faculty Publications

Our introduction and the essays collected in this Special Section address themselves to the ruins, creations, and legacies of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. More precisely, we ask how our notions of immunity and especially autoimmunity have changed over the last three years. We theorize autoimmunity in the wake of COVID-19 through approaches that consider the material and experiential phenomenology proliferated by the longue durée of both the experience of COVID-19 infection and the pandemic itself. In this way, we connect our inquiries both to the history of recent epidemics—most notably HIV/AIDS—and to broader philosophical and cultural investigations of what immunity …

Identifying Youth Appeals In Alcohol Alternative Social Media Content Through Framing, Melina Oneal

West Chester University Master’s Theses

Proposed regulations for alcohol advertising prevent beverage companies from targeting people under the legal drinking age. However, similar regulations for alcohol alternative beverages are less explored, which could allow alcohol alternative products to create awareness for alcoholic beverages among youth. Alcohol alternatives beverages, including no-alcohol and low-alcohol products, are increasing in popularity and can function as compliments to alcoholic products to decrease the total alcohol volume consumed or as substitutes for alcoholic products. Framing theory can be operationalized through the Content Appealing to Youth Index, an index of content elements found in research literature to be appealing to youth, to …

Men Under Microscopes: “Medical Gaze” And Homeostasis In Victorian Realist Literature, Nida Rashid

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis aims to explore the following questions implicit in four Victorian novels: is the relationship between science and humanities continuously at odds due to fundamental differences in philosophies? Can an understanding of how medicine transformed from an art to a science help bridge the gap between the arts and sciences? As medicine transformed into a science in the nineteenth century, it adopted three key innovations: first, Claude Bernard’s experimental method; second, what Michel Foucault later came to conceive of as the “medical gaze”; and third, Bernard’s theory of homeostasis. The thesis traces the changes in medicine as inflected across …

Supporting Characters: Prosthesis And Aesthetic Technologies Of Disability In The Victorian Novel, Rebecca L. Mccann

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the production of physical disability and the function of prosthesis in nineteenth-century British fiction. My intervention in disability studies readings of Victorian literature attends to the prosthetic object and prosthetic body not only as the dual products of medicine and art, but also as catalytic elements of fiction and culture. I read reciprocal developments in medical technology and disabled characterization in the Victorian novel to demonstrate how the artistic translation of the prosthetic object effected a set of criteria for defining people through both bodies and things and, in so doing, revealed the ways in which the …

The Glass Coffin: Gothic Adaptations And The Formation Of Sexual Subjectivity., Colton T. Wilson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

It is now an almost foregone conclusion that classic depictions of vampirism resonate with contemporary queer audiences. A sympathetic response to the monster’s persecution is often the key factor in these arguments, yet little attention is paid to the textual details that prompt such a process of identification. This study posits that the iconography used to establish a connection between monstrosity and non-normative sexuality has its origins in Victorian Gothic fiction, whose descriptions of vampirism were assimilated into the discourse of the fin-de-siècle medical field known as sexology. Theories that defined homosexuality as an illness with physical and psychological symptoms …

"It Will Help Him Wonderfully": Placebo And Meaning Responses In Early Medieval English Medicine, Rebecca Brackmann

Faculty Peer-Reviewed Publications

Many early English medical remedies have been dismissed, even by sympathetic scholars, as “mere placebo,” with the implication that therapeutic benefits to the patient, if any, are thereby insignificant. My article challenges such dismissals of placebo responses in Old English medicine. I draw on current research demonstrating that in certain conditions, a placebo effect, or “meaning response” (to use Daniel Moerman’s term), can have striking success in bringing about healing. I describe contemporary clinical practices shown to enhance patient responses to pharmaceutical treatments both inert and active, and demonstrate that these strategies are also visible in early English medical practice. …

Teaching Philippine Literature And Illness: Finding Cure In Humanities, John Paolo Sarce

English Faculty Publications

Health and illness as themes are uncommonly being touched in literature classrooms. Other than the lack of interdisciplinary studies or specialists in this field in the Philippines; often teachers are also confronted with tons of materials that they are either overwhelmed to teach or find it difficult to deliver on their classes. This is the goal of this paper; help teachers gain confidence and basic knowledge of teaching literature that discusses health and illness especially at this time of history. Helping both teachers and students to understand and appreciate literature as a space for developing empathy while also honing their …

Laurence Sterne: A Different Way Of Approaching The Notion Of Life In The Early Novel, Robert Metaxatos

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis employs the later philosophy of Michel Foucault to think through the unique set of socio-cultural problems that emerged alongside the early novel. I endeavor to explain the development of “biopower” and the concomitant (yet historically grounded) concept of a mass population in order to round off a nettlesome tendency among historicist rise-of-the-novel critics to focus on the creation of a bourgeois individual at this time. To that end, the texts of Anglo-Irish author Laurence Sterne bear out a unique narratorial response to biopower that begins with the ‘body’ of his work: i.e., Shandeism. Signaling the importance of the …

Medical Writing Practices: An Inquiry Into Writing Standards And Career Development Opportunities In Healthcare Communication, Carly Miller

Summer Scholarship, Creative Arts and Research Projects (SCARP)

The medical writing field is a growing industry with robust opportunities for writing students. Being a niche yet important area of science, medical writing is often overlooked as an area of study at the undergraduate level. In order to provide this opportunity for interested students, as well as diversify the course curriculum at Elizabethtown College, a study was conducted into the medical writing field. The focus of this project is to research the local medical writing industry, along with graduate programs in the field, to better determine how an undergraduate 200-level medical writing course could be incorporated at Elizabethtown College. …

Death, Discipline, And The Dead: Biopolitical Rhetoric In Early Modern English Texts, Leslie Raybuck Malland

Theses and Dissertations--English

Death, Discipline, and the Dead: Biopolitical Rhetoric in Early Modern English Texts locates allusions to the biopolitical culture of Early Modern England within popular English texts. Through my examination of the period’s fascination with death—public executions, newly-authorized anatomies—and the ways in which death, as well as the treatment of the dead, was authorized by and supported the ideological aims of the state, my research identifies how those themes carry over into the most popular works of the day, reviewing instances of both verbal and nonverbal rhetoric across genres to find allusions to biopower — or, state control of the biological. …

Mutilated Masculinity: Intersections Of Disability, Gender, And Mental Health In Modernist Fiction, Sara Thames

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

This thesis investigates the impact of the intersection of physical disabilities and mental health conditions on the masculine identities presented in modernist texts. Here, I analyze a collection of works by Ernest Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, Claude McKay, and Wilfred Owen. Utilizing a combination of theoretical approaches: trauma theory, gender and sexuality studies, narratology, disability studies, and insights from the medical humanities, I revisit well-known novels like The Sun Also Rises and Lady Chatterley's Lover and illuminate lesser-studied works like "A Natural History of the Dead" and the recently published Romance in Marseille. I recognize here the psychosocial struggles faced by …

Anatomic By Adam Dickinson, Heather Houser

The Goose

Review of Adam Dickinson's Anatomic.

The Impact Of Socioeconomic Factors On Food Insecurity Among Syrian Refugees In Florida, Racha Sankar

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Syrian refugees settled in the United States may experience food insecurity due to different socioeconomic factors that may include nutrition knowledge, language proficiency, women’s education, and perceived stress. The structure and the type of households may also contribute to food insecurity in this population.

The objective of this study was to measure food security among Syrian refugees residing in Florida. It also aimed to determine the socioeconomic factors that may attribute to food insecurity at household level.

A comprehensive 228-item questionnaire was administered to N=80 households (n=43 in rural areas, n=37 in urban areas). Families with and without children were …

"Free Indirect Suicide: An Unfinished Fugue In H Minor", Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

In this lyric essay/work of creative nonfiction (listed among “Notable Essays & Literary Nonfiction” in Best American Essays 2020), Seo-Young Chu uses poetry, autotheory, and creative nonfiction to explore the generational trauma/postmemory han she inherited from her parents and the importance of destigmatizing mental illness through dialogue.

Madness Narratives: Victorian Textual Responses To The Insanity Diagnosis, Jonathan Glenn Tinnin

Theses and Dissertations--English

In Madness Narratives, I examine four understudied texts at the intersection of Victorian asylums, patients’ lack of voice, and resistance narratives. I argue that these texts all reject the silencing power of the insanity diagnosis as they represent patients, former patients, and asylum reformers creating counternarratives that call for recognition of the patients’ humanity and right to be heard. In my first chapter, “Narrating Insanity: Constructing the Madness Narrative in Charles Reade’s Hard Cash,” I assert that Reade’s 1863 novel proposes a nuanced understanding of the insanity diagnosis as a collaboratively-composed story that justifies the confinement of the …

Fiqws 10113 Composition For Creative Expression- Narrative Medicine, Julia R. Brown

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Diagnosing The Will To Suffer: Lovesickness In The Medical And Literary Traditions, Jane Shmidt

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Throughout Western medical history, unconsummated, unreturned, or otherwise failed love was believed to generate a disorder of the mind and body that manifested in physiological and psychological symptoms. This study traces the medical and literary history of lovesickness from antiquity through the 19^th century, emphasizing significant moments in the development of the medical discourse on love. The project is part of the recent academic focus on the intersection between the humanities and the medical sciences, and it situates literary texts in concurrent medical and philosophical debates on afflictions of the psyche. By contextualizing the fictional works within the scientific …

Transcript: The Boy Who Lived, Suzie Asha Park

Video and Documents - The Boy Who Lived: Harry Potter and the Culture of Death

No abstract provided.

Reflection, Interrupted: Material Mirror Work In The Confessio Amantis, Jenny Boyar

Accessus

The Confessio Amantis concludes with a revelatory scene in which Venus holds up a mirror to Amans, allowing him to recognize John Gower the poet— a moment that is often read as a mimetic and healing counterpoint to the Confessio’s sickness and self-questioning. My intention in this paper is to very slightly modify certain aspects of this narrative, to consider how the materiality of the mirror can inform its metaphoric deployments in the Confessio. I organize my discussion around two seemingly contrasting moments in the poem in which the self is seen and in different ways recognized through …

Heavy Expectations: Reading Pregnancy In The Victorian Novel, Livia Arndal Woods

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation articulates the tendency of Victorian novels to make legible only the pregnant bodies of immodest characters who transgress gendered ideologies while the pregnant bodies of modest characters tend to go undescribed. Tracing the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth over the course of the long nineteenth century, my chapters demonstrate the function of moralizing narrative conventions in the representation of pregnancy in mid-Victorian novels, of a self-conscious use of free indirect diagnosis in high-Victorian fiction, and a shift at the fin-de-siècle from pregnancy as a signifier of morality to a symptom of unstable minds. The novels I read closely …

“Inhumanly Beautiful”: The Aesthetics Of The Nineteenth-Century Deathbed Scene, Margo Masur

English Theses

Death today is hidden from our everyday lives so it cannot intermingle with the general public. So when a family member dies, their body becomes an object in need of disposal; no longer can they be recognized as the familiar person they once were. To witness death is to force individuals to confront the truths of human existence, and for most of us seeing such a sight would fill us with an emotion of disgust. Yet during the nineteenth century, the burden of care towards the sick or dying was shared by a community of family, neighbors, and friends; 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.

A Public Duty: Medicine And Commerce In Nineteenth-Century American Literature And Culture, Heather E. Chacon

Theses and Dissertations--English

Using recent criticism on speculation and disability in addition to archival materials, “A Public Duty: Medicine and Commerce in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture” demonstrates that reform-minded nineteenth-century authors drew upon the representational power of public health to express excitement and anxiety about the United States’ emerging economic and political prominence. Breaking with a critical tradition holding that the professionalization of medicine and authorship served primarily to support and define an ascending middle class, I argue that the authors such as Robert Montgomery Bird, Fanny Fern, George Washington Cable, and Pauline Hopkins fuse the rhetoric of economic policy and public …

The Germ Theory Of Dystopias: Fears Of Human Nature In 1984 And Brave New World, Clea D. Harris

Scripps Senior Theses

This project is an exploration of 20^th century dystopian literature through the lens of germ theory. This scientific principle, which emerged in the late 19^th century, asserts that microorganisms pervade the world; these invisible and omnipresent germs cause specific diseases which are often life threatening. Additionally, germ theory states that vaccines and antiseptics can prevent some of these afflictions and that antibiotics can treat others. This concept of a pervasive, invisible, infection-causing other is not just a biological principle, though; in this paper, I argue that one can interpret it as an ideological framework for understanding human existence …

Martin Weinrich’S De Ortu Monstrorum Commentarius (1595) And Its Reception In England, Rachel E. Hile

Rachel E. Hile

No abstract provided.