On Caring through Sharing and Reading When Seeing: Attending to Formal Potentialities of Illness Narratives

Abstract

What are the formal potentialities of illness narratives across media and writerly modes? And how can a formalist reading within this genre contribute to an understanding of particularly stigmatized illnesses and conditions? This essay considers Julia Lederer's and Carolyn Lazard's semi-autobiographical works on anorexia nervosa and chronic illness, respectively, and approaches them through the lens of Caroline Levine's new formalist method, which fuses the literary (or artistic more broadly) with the social and political. It concludes that Lederer's and Lazard's imagination and creation of other, alternative worlds—worlds of illness and disability—provide critical insights into the meanings of illness, health, and well-being, and their political implications. In so doing, they also probe at and question the role of medicine in discursive constructions of illness and disability.