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Contemporary Cultural Studies in Illness, Health and Medicine

Metaphor in Illness WritingFight and Battle Reused

By Anita Wohlmann

Open access
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£100.00

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About this book

Listen to the interview with Anita Wohlmann about Metaphor in Illness Writing in New Books Network here.


Defends conventional and even problematic illness metaphors by emphasizing their varied usability



  • Offers a more capacious understanding of metaphors by considering the varied, unpredictable, and surprising usability of metaphors

  • Uses a doubled approach to metaphors that is grounded in metaphor theory and narrative theory in order to illustrate the nuanced and complex ways in which even problematic metaphors can be engaged with

  • Identifies the distinct strategies that prominent writers use when they actively and creatively engage with metaphors

  • Makes a contribution to research at the boundaries of metaphor theory and narrative theory by analysing how metaphor and narrative intersect and interact with one another


Metaphor in Illness Writing argues that even when a metaphor appears problematic and limiting, it need not be dropped or dismissed. Metaphors are not inherently harmful or beneficial; instead, they can be used in unexpected and creative ways. This book analyses the illness writing of contemporary North American writers who reimagine and reappropriate the supposedly harmful metaphor ‘illness is a fight’ and shows how Susan Sontag, Audre Lorde, Anatole Broyard, David Foster Wallace and other writers turn the fight metaphor into a space of agency, resistance, self-knowledge and aesthetic pleasure. It joins a conversation in Medical Humanities about alternatives to the predominance of narrative and responds to the call for more metaphor literacy and metaphor competence.

Reviews

Metaphors in Illness Writing will be of great importance not only to literary scholars working in the fields of medical humanities and narrative medicine, but also to researchers and practitioners in the domain of medicine. It is one of the accomplishments of Wohlmann’s study that it consciously addresses both audiences. Despite this need to speak both to specialists in literary studies and to medical practitioners for whom the study of metaphor may seem quite novel, Wohlmann’s study never loses sight of the complexity of its topic: Metaphor in Illness Writing is highly complex and accessible at one and the same time, and it is tremendously well written.
Metaphor in Illness Writing is a well written and intellectually strenuous work of high-level medical humanities scholarship. The book will be of great interest to metaphor scholars, scholars of illness life writing, and suitably-versed healthcare professionals.
Wohlmann’s findings are important to refresh scholarly perspectives on the figuration of illness. By challenging the traditional binary assumptions on metaphors, she provides a more comprehensive framework by which to apprehend the roles of metaphors: metaphors bear a transformative potential while remaining potentially limiting and harmful.
Metaphor in Illness Writing offers concrete tools for fields like narrative medicine: it helps us to recognize the work that metaphors do in the world and challenge them when needed.

Anita Wohlmann argues that metaphors in illness writing, however common, can be upcycled in dynamic ways, even reborn from ashes. I am convinced! Her book is a metaphorical gem, a work of meticulous inquiry into trope redux and renewed. I discovered deep value at each footfall. Beautifully written, mightily provocative.

In lucid and lively prose, Anita Wohlmann greatly expands our understanding of metaphor while combining deft close readings with practical application. This marvellous account of metaphor’s many uses and reuses will become an essential reference point for literary studies as well as the medical humanities.
Table of contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

  1. Metaphor Use: Strategies and Methods
  2. Susan Sontag: Using Metaphor ‘to see more, to hear more, to feel more’
  3. Audre Lorde: Stretching, Risks and Difference
  4. Anatole Broyard: A Style for Being Ill; or, Metaphor ‘Light’
  5. David Foster Wallace’s Troubled Little Soldier: Narrative and Irony
  6. From Theory to Practice: A Method for Using Metaphor


Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

About the author

Anita Wohlmann

Anita Wohlmann is Associate Professor in Contemporary Anglophone Literature at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense. She co-edited three anthologies, among them Narrative Medizin: Praxisbeispiele aus dem deutschsprachigen Raum (2021) and Narrating Disability in Literature and Visual Media (2019). She is the author of Aged Young Adults: Age Readings of Contemporary American Novels and Films (2014).

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