The textbooks that I used as a medical student in the 1990s were illustrated with photographs of real patients. I can vividly recall the images of three depicted patients, stripped naked, standing with their palms facing upwards, posed with their hands by their sides and feet shoulder width apart like Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man….
Tag: fiction
Bodily Loss in Illness: The Phenomenology of Influenza in Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was
Avril Tynan // It is an uncanny experience to read Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was in 2021. Written in 2013 by renowned Icelandic author Sjón and translated into English by Victoria Cribb in 2016, the short novel tells the story of a pandemic that surges across Europe and devastates the isolated Icelandic capital. The…
Skin Deep: Biometrics and Containment in Sabrina Vourvoulias’s INK
Salvador Herrera // On October 22nd, 2019, the U.S. Department of Justice proposed a rule titled “DNA-Sample Collection From Immigration Detainees.”[1] The rule would remove one Obama-era exception in the Code of Federal Regulations to the DNA Fingerprint Act of 2005: an exception that dismisses DNA collection as a requirement if institutional funds are limited.[2]…
Probing the Victorian Corpus: Health Humanities Approaches to 19th-Century Fiction
Synapsis Writers // MLA Conference, January 3, 2019 “What have the health humanities offered 19th-century literary studies?” In January, a group of Synapsis writers took up this call with great zest at the MLA Conference in Chicago, where they spoke on the inaugural panel sponsored by our journal. As these panel proceedings reveal, our speakers…
Cyborgs Pt. 2: Cellular Agencies in Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea
Kathryn Cai Reviews of Chang-rae Lee’s 2014 novel On Such a Full Sea note its “bureaucratic aesthetic,”[1] its unsatisfactory narrative trajectory in which nothing seems to build, and Fan as an opaque, “monochromatic,”[2] and ultimately unsatisfactory heroine lacking in interiority,[3] particularly compared to the “adventure” heroines, such as Katniss Everdeen, that populate conventional heroic and dystopic…
Breaking Through Trauma with Creative Writing and Bibliotherapy
What benefits might be found in writing about experiences of trauma? Alternatively, what might be the effect of reading about somebody else’s experiences? In my October and November posts, I explored aspects of the medical and rehabilitative object-human relationships in Harry Parker’s novel Anatomy of a Soldier. Although a work of fiction, Parker’s novel is semi-autobiographical….
Embracing the Fiction in Sci-Fi
I recently returned from the annual conference for the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. Science fiction has been, as you can imagine, a rather common theme here and I was excited to see that this year was no exception. Like last year, there was a panel…