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Memoirs have enjoyed great popularity in recent years, experiencing significant sales, prominent reviews, and diverse readerships. Signifying Bodies shows that at the heart of the memoir phenomenon is our fascination with writing that focuses on what it means to live in, or be, an anomalous body—in other words, what it means to be disabled. Previous literary accounts of the disabled body have often portrayed it as a stable entity possibly signifying moral deviance or divine disfavor, but contemporary writers with disabilities are defining themselves and depicting their bodies in new ways. Using the insights of disability studies and source material ranging from the Old and New Testaments to the works of authors like Lucy Grealy and Simi Linton and including contemporary films such as Million Dollar Baby, G. Thomas Couser sheds light on a broader cultural phenomenon, exploring topics such as the ethical issues involved in disability memoirs, the rhetorical patterns they frequently employ, and the complex relationship between disability narrative and disability law.

In his article “Illness, Disability, and Ethical Life Writing,” G. Thomas Couser discusses illness and disability as related to ethical Life Writing. Since the issues came to his attention in the early 1990s, narratives of illness and disability have continued to proliferate in the US. And today, even as psychiatry moves away from narrative therapy toward drug therapy, narrative competence is being emphasized in the treatment of non-mental illness. Whether inside or outside the clinic, narratives of illness and disability can be in and of themselves restorative, if not healing. And yet, the production of such narratives is not without ethical pitfalls. Professional ethics do not necessarily prevent violation of privacy or other harms.

Posthumanist life writing expresses what humanist life writing has historically suppressed or denied—the reality that, individually and collectively, humans are deeply dependent on each other (especially at the beginning and end of life); on other species (for sustenance, labor, raw material, and companionship); and of course, to an increasing extent, on technology.

This work explores the \"authority\" of autobiography in several related senses: first, the idea that autobiography is authoritative writing because it is presumably verifiable; second, the idea that one's life is one's exclusive textual domain; third, the idea that, because of the apparent congruence between the implicit ideology of the genre and.

This is a provocative look at writing by and about people with illness or disability—in particular HIV/AIDS, breast cancer, deafness, and paralysis—who challenge the stigmas attached to their conditions by telling their lives in their own ways and on their own terms. Discussing memoirs, diaries, collaborative narratives, photo documentaries, essays, and other forms of life writing, G. Thomas Couser shows that these books are not primarily records of medical conditions; they are a means for individuals to recover their bodies (or those of loved ones) from marginalization and impersonal medical discourse. Responding to the recent growth of illness and disability narratives in the United States—such works as Juliet Wittman's Breast Cancer Journal, John Hockenberry's Moving Violations, Paul Monette's Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir, and Lou Ann Walker's A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family—Couser addresses questions of both poetics and politics. He examines why and under what circumstances individuals choose to write about illness or disability; what role plot plays in such narratives; how and whether closure is achieved; who assumes the prerogative of narration; which conditions are most often represented; and which literary conventions lend themselves to representing particular conditions. By tracing the development of new subgenres of personal narrative in our time, this book explores how explicit consideration of illness and disability has enriched the repertoire of life writing. In addition, Couser's discussion of medical discourse joins the current debate about whether the biomedical model is entirely conducive to humane care for ill and disabled people. With its sympathetic critique of the testimony of those most affected by these conditions, Recovering Bodies contributes to an understanding of the relations among bodily dysfunction, cultural conventions, and identity in contemporary America.

Disability is an inescapable element of human existence and experience. Although it is rarely acknowledged as such, it is also a fundamental aspect of human diversity. It is so, first, in the sense that, worldwide, an enormous number of people are disabled. The proportion of disabled people in different national populations varies significantly with factors such as economic development, quality and availability of health care, and the age distribution of the population. (In the United States, people with disabilities make up the population's largest minority: Census 2000 found nearly twenty percent of the population over five years of age to be affected by some sort of disability [United States, Census Bureau].) Furthermore, because of the way this minority is constituted, it is arguably more diverse than those of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation. Disabilities may affect one's senses or one's mobility; they may be static or progressive, congenital or acquired, formal (affecting the shape of the body) or functional, visible or invisible.

(My father unhelpfully said I shouldn't worry about that; my mother, equally unhelpfully, consulted a book titled something like Sight without Glasses, and encouraged me to \"exercise my eyes\" to improve my vision.) That is, it was not just about my appearance to others. In retrospect, I can see the irony in reverting to wearing glasses after expensive elective surgery motivated by lifelong resistance to wearing spectacles. By middle age, the wound to my ego caused by the discovery of my myopia had long since healed-or been eclipsed by the discoveries of other, more significant personal limitations.