Overview

Unfitting Stories: Narrative Approaches to Disease, Disability, and Trauma illustrates how stories about ill health and suffering have been produced and received from a variety of perspectives. Bringing together the work of Canadian researchers, health professionals, and people with lived experiences of disease, disability, or trauma, it addresses central issues about authority in medical and personal narratives and the value of cross- or interdisciplinary research in understanding such experiences. The book considers the aesthetic dimensions of health-related stories with literary readings that look at how personal accounts of disease, disability, and trauma are crafted by writers and filmmakers into published works. Topics range from psychiatric hospitalization and aestheticizing cancer, to father-daughter incest in film. The collection also deals with the therapeutic or transformative effect of stories with essays about men, sport, and spinal cord injury; narrative teaching at L'Arche (a faith-based network of communities inclusive of people with developmental disabilities); and the construction of a ""schizophrenic"" identity. A final section examines the polemical functions of narrative, directing attention to the professional and political contexts within which stories are constructed and exchanged. Topics include ableist limits on self-narration; drug addiction and the disease model; and narratives of trauma and Aboriginal post-secondary students. Unfitting Stories is essential reading for researchers using narrative methods or materials, for teachers, students, and professionals working in the field of health services, and for concerned consumers of the health care system. It deals with practical problems relevant to policy-makers as well as theoretical issues of interest to specialists in bioethics, gender analysis, and narrative theory. Read the chapter ""Social Trauma and Serial Autobiography: Healing and Beyond"" by Bina Freiwald on the Concordia University Library Spectrum Research Repository website.

Full Product Details

Author:   Valerie Raoul ,  Connie Canam ,  Angela D. Henderson ,  Carla Paterson
Publisher:   Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Imprint:   Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.80cm , Height: 2.90cm , Length: 23.50cm
Weight:   0.676kg
ISBN:  

9780889205093

ISBN 10:   0889205094
Pages:   376
Publication Date:   30 March 2007
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   No Longer Our Product
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

Unfitting Stories: Narrative Approaches to Disease, Disability, and Trauma edited by Valerie Raoul, Connie Canam, Angela D. Henderson, and Carla Paterson Acknowledgments and Dedication Introduction — Narrative Frames Making Sense of Disease, Disability, and Trauma: Normative and Disruptive Stories The Editors Interdisciplinarity and Postdisciplinarity in Health Research in Canada Judy Z. Segal Part I — Public Framing of Personal Narratives Introduction: Aesthetics, Authenticity, and Audience The Editors Authorizing the Story: Lauren Slaters Memoirs of Mental Illness Helen Buss Telling Trauma: Two Narratives of Psychiatric Hospitalization Hilary Clark AIDS, Trauma, and Temporality: Paul Monette between Two Deaths Lisa Diedrich Paper Thin: Agency and Anorexia in Geneviéve Brisac's Petite Barbara Havercroft Incomprehensible Density of Being: Aestheticizing Cancer Ulrich Teucher Challenging Subjects: Bodies, Texts, and Legitimacy Heidi Janz and Julie Rak The Techtonics of Trauma: Father-Daughter Incest in Film Gail Finney The Silvering Screen: Age and Trauma in Kurasawa's Rhapsody in August Sally Chivers Part II — Representing the Subject Introduction: Narrative in Qualitative Research and Therapeutics The Editors Writing about Illness: Therapy or Testimony? Anne Hunsaker Hawkins Constructing a ``Schizophrenic'' Identity Barbara Schneider Space, Temporality and Subjectivity in a Narrative of Psychotic Experience Lourdes Rodriguez Del Barrio Re-sounding Images: Outsiders in Blackridge's Sunnybrook Joy James (Story-)Telling It like It Is: How Narratives Teach at L'Arche Pamela Cushing Disrupting the Academic Self: Living with Lupus Janet MacArthur Women Surviving Hemorrhagic Stroke: Narratives of Meaning Sharon Dale Stone Men, Sport, and Spinal Cord Injury: Identity Dilemmas Brett Smith and Andrew C. Sparkes Part III — The Larger Picture Introduction: Metanarrative Politics and Polemics The Editors Disability Income: Narratives of Women with Multiple Sclerosis Lyn Jongbloed Narratives of Trauma and Aboriginal Postsecondary Students Robert Procyk and Christine Crowe Social Trauma and Serial Autobiography: Healing and Beyond Bina Toledo Freiwald Reports from the Psych Wars Richard Ingram Agoraphobia, Social Order, and Psychiatric Narrative Shelley Z. Reuter The Disease Is Responsible? Drug Addiction and the Disease Model Joanne Muzak Temporal Assumptions: Aging with Cystic Fibrosis J. Daniel Schubert Ableist Limits on Self-Narration: The Concept of Post-Personhood James Overboe Narrative Conclusions — An Example of Cross-Disciplinary Analysis Margaret Edson's Play Wit: Death at the End or the End of Death? Valerie Raoul, Connie Canam, Gloria Oneyoziri, Carla Paterson Postscript Bibliography

Reviews

The individual essays in Unfitting Stories provide useful examples of possible approaches to the study of disease, disability, and trauma narratives, including the acknowledgement of both the potentials of and problems with research focused on narrative. (The latter are addressed most directly by James Overboe's challenge to the way narrative has become synonymous with personhood.) The strength of this book is its interdisciplinary and its expressed awareness of the possibilities and obstacles of an interdisplinary project. The overarching message of the volume is that no single disciplinary approach can be comprehensive--that cross-disciplinary conversations need to happen in order to help us better understand the role of narrative in relation to the destabilizing forces of disease, disability, and trauma.''--Sheila Bock Western Folklore, 68, 2-3, 2009

The individual essays in <i>Unfitting Stories</i> provide useful examples of possible approaches to the study of disease, disability, and trauma narratives, including the acknowledgement of both the potentials of and problems with research focused on narrative. (The latter are addressed most directly by James Overboe's challenge to the way narrative has become synonymous with personhood.) The strength of this book is its interdisciplinary and its expressed awareness of the possibilities and obstacles of an interdisplinary project. The overarching message of the volume is that no single disciplinary approach can be comprehensive--that cross-disciplinary conversations need to happen in order to help us better understand the role of narrative in relation to the destabilizing forces of disease, disability, and trauma.''--Sheila Bock Western Folklore, 68, 2-3, 2009

Author Information

Valerie Raoul is a professor of womenâs studies and French and the director of the SAGA Centre for Studies in Autobiography, Gender, and Age; Connie Canam and Angela D. Henderson are faculty members in the School of Nursing; Carla Paterson teaches in the interdisciplinary Arts Foundations program, all at the University of British Columbia. Funded by the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at UBC, the editors were involved in the interdisciplinary project on narratives of disease, disability, and trauma on which this book is based. Connie Canam is a faculty member in the School of Nursing at the University of British Columbia. Angela D. Henderson is a faculty member in the School of Nursing at the University of British Columbia. Carla Paterson teaches in the interdisciplinary Arts Foundations program at the University of British Columbia.

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