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"Cancer in women Fiction."
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Audre Lorde
Audre Lorde, a trailblazing Black feminist, poet, and essayist, passionately explored intersectionality, identity, and activism, leaving an enduring impact on literature and social justice.
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A sky so close
\"A Syrian woman living in Jordan struggles with a cancer diagnosis while her family remains trapped in Raqqa during the present civil war.\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Essaying Pain
Narrative has long been central to the study of literature about illness, but we err if we assume that memoir and fiction alone depict the embodied experience of physical suffering. Contemporary writers also turn to the essay. In French, essayer means to attempt, and writing essays requires facing difficult questions and predicaments, confronting uncertainty and the unknown. Among recent literary essays, many are about women in pain. These include Eula Biss's \"The Pain Scale\" (2005) and Leslie Jamison's \"Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain\" (2014). Each of these writers asks: How, when, and why do we suffer? Why is women's pain so often diminished, dismissed, and misunderstood? And why, in response to the suffering of others, do we regularly fail to provide what is needed?
Journal Article
The “Cinderella Fantasy”: Reading Jane Austen’s “Darling Child” Pride and Prejudice through the Lens of Carol Shields’s Biography Jane Austen: A Life
Shields claims that Austen revolutionized the novel by domesticating and thus feminizing it, transforming it from novels that bark, like Scott's \"Big Bow-Wow\" books,4 to fiction that purrs-from a macrocosmic world reflecting male power to a microcosmic setting-about \"3 or 4 Families in a Country Village\" (Letters 401), that reflect a woman's world in miniature on \"the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour\" (Letters 469), as Austen described her own fiction.5 Shields declares, \"The novelistic architecture may have been borrowed from the eighteenth-century novelists, but [Austen] made it new, clean, and rational, just as though she'd taken a broom to the old fussiness of plot and action,\" adding, \"She did this all alone\" (143). Shields, who wrote Jane Austen: A Life after receiving a terminal breast cancer diagnosis in 1998, hypothesizes, for example, that Austen died of breast cancer, perhaps implying a desire to recreate Austen in her own image or at least an urge to identify with her (173). Melissa Pope Eden claims in \"The Subjunctive Mode of One's Self\": \"this particular literary biography is both about a renowned woman writer and written by a renowned woman writer who not only identifies herself as a feminist but also identifies Austen as a literary foremother, as \"Shields effectively sets her reader up to think of Austen in terms of a tradition of literary mothers and daughters\" (147, 169, n2).10 Faye Hammill affirms in her review of Shields's life of Austen that her emphasis on the mother-daughter relationship \"raises the idea of a female tradition, and constructs Austen as a literary foremother to Shields\" (143). The difference is that Shields, writing in the postmodernist era, portrays intelligent women who are also writers, from biographer and would-be novelist Judith Gill of her first novel Small Ceremonies in 1977 to Reta Winters, author of comic fiction, in her last novel Unless in 2002, allowing for the self-reflexive meta-fictionality that Shields enjoys in her portrayal of writing as performance.
Journal Article
Prizing Literature: The Novel in 2017
This article examines significant works of fiction published in 2017. The leitmotif which runs through the discussion is the PrixWepler Fondation de la Poste, the literary prize that has been offered in the name of Clichy's Café Wepler for the last twenty years. The degree to which this prize is different from the more traditional prizes will be considered, as will the rather unique way theWepler chooses its jurors.
Journal Article
The Wounded Breast
This is a rare multicultural perspective on disease, particularly cancer, in which the author takes on a journey through the medical establishments, cultural taboos, gender-tagged attitudes and personal stories of different civilisations. It could also be defined as a quest on how human logic relates to illness. The writing itself blends the diary, personal letters, poems and songs with excerpts from some of the foremost authorities in cancer research, producing an effect upon the reader akin to that which she experienced herself, as she moved back and forth between the emotional and physical shock of the cancer experience and the objective scientific data she uncovered. She begins to find cancer everywhere in her physical environment: friends, relatives and people she has never met -- some die. She finds a depth of friendship and support that she had never expected including that of her close companion. While writing her book she sent sections of it to friends, who commented on the text. These honest responses to her story add a further dimension. The structure and content of the book are informed by her deep commitment to women, men, ecology and peace issues. As part of the journey she reads many books on the environment and cancer. Although she lives in the USA and France, the book takes the reader on physical journeys to many other cities including Paris, Tunis and Beirut.
eBook
Valid/Invalid: Women's Cancer Narratives and the Phenomenology of Bodily Alteration
This article explores the phenomenology of involuntary bodily alteration as breast and ovarian cancer patients have depicted it in first-person narratives written from 1980 to 2012. A study of postoperative reactions to mastectomy, lumpectomy, and oophorectomy in autopathographies by Christina Middlebrook, Catherine Lord, and Susan Gubar reveals a gradual lessening of the stigma associated with cancer as well as greater public acceptance of altered female body images. The evidence of these changes is situated in language that the pathographers use to characterize themselves physically— characterizations that register from the poles of profound alienation from the body to pleasure in reabsorbing the altered body image. I conclude that the erasure of personal stigma and the dread on which it feeds must occur before a more collective enterprise, aimed at discovering the causes of breast cancer rather than treating its symptoms, gains momentum.
Journal Article