Chronic Conditions

Karen Engle

ISBN 10: 0228016746 / ISBN 13: 9780228016748

Edité par McGill-Queen's University Press 2023-05-19, 2023

A propos de cet article

N° de réf. du vendeur 6666-GRD-9780228016748

Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: Chronic Conditions
• Éditeur: McGill-Queen's University Press 2023-05-19
• Date de parution: 2023
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN à 10 chiffres: 0228016746
• ISBN à 13 chiffres: 9780228016748
• Reliure: Paperback
• État de l'article: New

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Synopsis

Imagine a house whose wiring is spliced and patchy with knob and tube, coiled like a serpent ready to strike and spark at any moment. Even if you have a fire trap behind your walls, the lights will turn on. In her memoir of a life lived in physical pain, Karen Engle asks whether and how language can capture what it’s like to be in a body that appears to work from the outside, when its internal systems operate through an ad hoc assemblage of garbled messaging, reroutings, and shaky foundations. <br /><br /> A series of narrative reflections capture the myriad ways in which the chronic conditions its suffering subject. Contrary to claims that pain obliterates language – long a trope of writing about illness – Engle contends that the person with chronic pain is not hampered by a scarcity of language, but rather its excess: enervation by the unending waves of utterance. From a history of the word chronic and its shifting significance to meditations on multiple diagnoses and interactions with medical personnel, Chronic Conditions is a doctor’s case file through the looking glass of a creative writer, scholar, and patient. Engle explores, through medical research, literature, and art, how it feels to become attuned to the rhythms of perpetual and mysterious physical pain. <br /><br /> At stake here is the search for a kind of writing that does not instrumentalize pain for allegorical or transcendental purposes. Chronic pain is not a sign of weakness, nor is it an opportunity for personal growth, Engle argues. Instead, it is entirely ordinary and deeply affecting.

À propos de l?auteur

Karen Engle is professor of visual culture at the University of Windsor, author of Seeing Ghosts: 9/11 and the Visual Imagination, and co-editor of Feelings of Structure: Explorations in Affect.