Stories of Illness and Health. Illness uproots one's certainties, and therefore seems to ask for a new life narrative. While not everyone feels the need to tell a story of illness and (loss of) health, illness narratives have grown into a substantial literary genre of their own. There is a second way in which stories and illness have proven to be a fruitful combination: namely in how they make up a narrative medical ethics. It has become quite commonly accepted amongst medical practitioners that decisions (about treatment for example) should be informed by a patient's existential outlook, or their narrative framework, or their previous life decisions. This summer school wants to look at how illness and narrative constitute one another, both on an individual and a societal level, and at how insights from literary theory deepen or broaden standard conceptions of narrative ethics in health care.
We will address questions such as:
- Do narratives help to cope with illness?
- Is our individual self-consciousness narratively structured? Or does illness rather expose the illusion of the narrative self?
- Do social imaginaries in western culture ignore the importance and inevitability of illness and death?
- Do we need new ways to represent what illness means to our self-understanding?
Seminars and lectures were given by Angela Woods, Havi Carel, Anna Gotlib, Daan Kenis and Arya Thampuran
Academic organizers of the summer school: Kristien Hens, Katrien Schaubroeck and Leni Van Goidsenhoven).