Illness and the Limits of Expression (Conversations in Medicine and Society) | 
| Author: Kathlyn Conway
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Category: Book
Buy New: $50.00
New (9) Used (5) from $50.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 1518131
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 180
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.7 x 5.8 x 0.9
ISBN: 0472116193
Dewey Decimal Number: 610
EAN: 9780472116195
ASIN: 0472116193
Publication Date: November 12, 2007
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Product Description
A sophisticated literary, psychoanalytic, and philosophical treatise on illness and narrative form, Illness and the Limits of Expression investigates the failings of standard survivor literature by asking how language can be used to express the catastrophic experience of disease. While battling three bouts of cancer herself, Kathlyn Conway became familiar with the "success" narratives of disability and sickness---stories of the woman who still looked beautiful after three successive treatments or the man who ran five miles a day during chemotherapy---all of which emphasized victory born of hope and positive thinking. Believing that such upbeat accounts insufficiently portrayed the intense emotional strain, physical deterioration, and mental terror brought about by illness, Conway began to investigate the far less popular nontriumphalist genres of illness literature---by authors such as Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion, and Susan Sontag. Instead of shying away from the uglier sides of illness, these writers explore how disease and devastation separate us from ourselves and why much can be learned about identity and language by noting this division. Through her readings of both sets of narratives, Conway shows how difficult it is to express the reality of serious illness or injury, but she also argues that by wrestling with this challenge, writers can offer a better picture of the complex relationship between body and mind. Kathlyn Conway is a practicing psychotherapist and the author of Ordinary Life: A Memoir of Illness. She lives in New York City with her husband and two children. "This is a wonderful book, whose message is extremely important but all too rarely heard: most published accounts of illness gloss over its difficulties and horror. People struggling with serious illness and disability deserve more. With clear writing and sound scholarship, Illness and the Limits of Expression takes on this challenge and should be read by both scholarly and general audiences."
---Emily Abel, University of California, Los Angeles
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| Customer Reviews:
sobering and thoughtful March 26, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
What a magnificent, literate and thoughtful book. We all will face the terrible fact of debilitating illness at some point in our lives and how we do it and what it means will become especially important to us then. We'll turn to the bookshelves of our local Barnes & Nobles only to find books that entreat us to "act normal," to "live life to its fullest" and to "think positively," all homilies written by those who don't know -- or can't write -- any better. This book, the second masterpiece written by Conway, gives us a deeper look into why we, as Americans, desperately want to avoid the true nature of illness and its devastating consequences. It also looks at the very structure of our language, our literature and our lives to dig into the deeper literary reasons why we can never confront the true meaning of disease.
In its simplest terms, Conway maintains, the very structure of our language and our literary traditions make it all but impossible to really describe what serious illness is rtruly like. She plumbs the literature to find examples of writers who can capture even a little bit of the experience in words. From Virginia Wolff through Andrew Solomon she selects those few examples to examine the broad literature and the common culture of illness. It's an astounding and thought provoking -- and beautifully written -- read!
Beyond "Triumph" December 6, 2007
Cancer is not simply an "opportunity for personal growth" writes Dr. Kathlyn Conway in this timely, lucid, and provocative book. Conway knows her subject first-hand. Five years ago she wrote: "I'm a 47-year-old woman with one husband, 2 children and 3 cancers." She was diagonsed with Hodgkins disease at 26, with brast cancer at 43 and lymphoma at 45. Her 2002 memoir, "Ordinary Life" told the story of agonizing decisions, physical incapacitation and medical mistakes. (They aimed the radiation too high, which destroyed her hearing in one ear. They then aimed it too low which caused cancer in the other breast.) As she eventually returns to "ordinary life" her young daughter, Molly, asks: "Is breast cancer over, Mom." She replies reassuringly, "Yes, honey, breast cancer is over." In "Illness and the Limits of Expression" Conway lets us in on a secret. Just as the galleys of her previous book arrived in the mail, her doctors discovered another cancer. Should he re-write the ending or stop on a positive note. Deciding that all memoirs need to end somewhere she chooses the latter but with significant ambivalence. As she recovers from her 4th cancer, she begins the project of reading every illness memoir she can find. Conway discovers that her decision to tend the book on a positive note reflects a major trend in American books on the subject. A huge number tell of "doing battle" with cancer, "showing great courage in the fight" and ultimately "winning that war"--what she refers to as the "triumph narrative." She quotes William Dean Howells to good effect. "What the American public wants in theater is tragedy with a happy ending." The New Age authors can be particularly troublesome, asking patients why they "invited" cancer into their system. Deepak Chopra seems to believe that serious illness is caused by hostility, resentment-- a bad attitude. New Age thinking offers comfor to millions because it offers a sense of supreme control over our bodies. (This is in contrast to the Buddhist view, for example, that teaches: Life is suffering.) The notion that we are in charge of everything is something worth examining. In refreshing contrast to New Age triumphalism, Conway assures us that despite having a wonderful husband and supportive family and friends, she was grumpy and unheroic most of the time and that her illness had "no redeeming value." She writes: "We long to hear from someone who admits that even enormous love from others does not erase the essential loneliness of illness." Conway attributs her recovery not to positive thoughts but to the fact that her cancers were caught early and that she could afford health insurance. (INcidentally, anyone who might imagine that being a famous writer, a celebrated journalist, a respected physician or all of the above might result in fewer medical nightmares or better bedside manner needs to read the illness memoirs of Audre Lorde, Barbara Ehrenreich, Anatole Broyard and Oliver Sacks--each summarized in her book.) What illness does is shatter belief in a unified self, and language offers a means to construct coherence. Language must also fail, however, because it can only approximate the experience of having body parts--breasts, feet, tongues--lopped off. She concludes by pointing out that this very failure of language and of literature "paradoxically allows us as readers to approach the ground of desolation where consolation will or will not come to each of us in our own time and in ways of our own making and unmaking." This is not the language of victory, and yet in its clarity and authenticity there is a kind of overcoming. "Illness and the Limits of Expression" then points to a worldview that is less sunny, a self whose coherence is always greatly exaggerated and to a psychology that might embrace and map rathern than turn away from our basic brokenness. This book is an intelligent, loving guide for the journey.
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