Veröffentlicht von De Gruyter

Medical & Health Humanities

Aesthetics, Analyses, Approaches

Herausgegeben von: Mita Banerjee, Monika Pietrzak-Franger und Anita Wohlmann

ISSN: 2940-9632

e-ISSN 2940-9640

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Over the last decades, the medical and health humanities have established themselves as vibrant interdisciplinary fields. Responding to these developments, the series seeks to encourage further innovation by stressing three points.

First, in looking at health and illness as a spectrum of cultural practices, it sets out to spotlight both individual and collective experiences. With that, it draws attention to the questions of inequality and social justice and expands the purview of current research to include more-than-human subjects, entanglements, and perspectives.

Second, it aims to broaden the current cultural and geographical scope beyond Western cultures and Western medicine to address different cultural and medical imaginaries as they can be found, for instance, in the Global South and Eastern Europe.

Third, it emphasizes the historical and aesthetic dimensions of the expression of illness experience. With this, it draws attention to a variety of forms and media used in this context and decidedly goes beyond the narrow focus on illness narratives. This attention to the aesthetic dimension of medical and health humanities has significant consequences on the methodological level, since it opens up new spaces for conversations between media analysis, artistic practice, and empirical research.

Encompassing monographs, edited collections, and critical explorations either in English or German, the peer-reviewed series offers ground-breaking interventions into the field, well-focused multidisciplinary dialogues as well as in-depth, methodologically and theoretically innovative studies.

Buch Open Access 2024

Future T/Issues

Organ Transplantation in Literary and Medical Narratives

Ruth Gehrmann

Band 5 in dieser Reihe

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Transplant practices are discussed in the medical realm, in fictional texts and in popular advertisement. Yet how do these sectors intersect and influence each other? How can the accounts of surgeons invested in transplant practice be brought into conversation with fictional voices?

Future T/Issues positions transplantation at the intersection of natural science and the humanities and adds to the discussion of organ transplantation by focusing on one specific aspect that is commonly overlooked: the idea of speculation. By engaging with speculative fiction in conversation with life writing, it contributes to a more thorough understanding of transplantation as a cultural practice, showcasing that transplantation is imagined as part of the future both within and beyond the literary sphere. Hereby, this book establishes the relationship between literary and medical narratives as reciprocal, in effect eroding boundaries between the life sciences and literary studies.

As an interdisciplinary endeavor, this study contributes to literary studies, specifically to the fields of life writing, speculative fiction, and young adult fiction, it offers insights for the study of transplantation in the popular realm and adds to the medical humanities.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111414638
ISBN:: 9783111414638
ISBN:: 9783111415567
ISBN:: 9783111413259
Fachgebiet:: Literaturwissenschaft
Fachgebiet:: Gattungen und Medien
Fachgebiet:: Biographie und Autobiographie
Verlag:: De Gruyter

Buch 2024

Applied Global Health Humanities

Readings in the Global Anglophone Novel

Fella Benabed

Band 4 in dieser Reihe

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This book highlights the importance of global Anglophone literature in global health humanities, shaping perceptions of health issues in the Global South and among minorities in the Global North. Using twelve novels, it explores the historical, political, sociocultural, ethical, and environmental aspects of health by analyzing the experiences of characters who suffer from infectious diseases, mental disorders, or disabilities, and who seek holistic healing practices.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111396392
ISBN:: 9783111396392
ISBN:: 9783111396101
ISBN:: 9783111396583
Fachgebiet:: Literaturwissenschaft
Fachgebiet:: Anglo-Amerikanische Literatur
Fachgebiet:: Anglo-Amerikanische Literatur, allgemein
Verlag:: De Gruyter

Buch Open Access 2023

Fluchtlinien der Sprache(n)

Migration, Kulturkontakt und Sprachbewegung im Spiegel der ›Medical Humanities‹

Katharina Fürholzer, Julia Pröll

Band 3 in dieser Reihe

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Migration bedeutet eine – häufig physisch und psychisch traumatisierende – Zäsur, die vor multiple Verlusterfahrungen stellt. Diese sind mitunter schwer artikulierbar, sei es aufgrund sprachlich-kultureller Hürden, sei es aufgrund des Umstandes, dass das Erlebte das Vorstell- und Sagbare übersteigt. Derartige ‚Fluchtlinien der Sprache‘ stellen nicht zuletzt das (westliche) Gesundheitswesen vor Herausforderungen, das sich aktuell mehr denn je mit Migrant:innen konfrontiert sieht. Gerade wenn es um die Wiedererlangung von (sprachlicher) Handlungsmacht geht, kommt künstlerischen Ausdrucksformen besonderer Stellenwert zu: verstanden als liminaler in-between space eröffnet die grenzüberschreitende Freiheit des Ästhetischen die Möglichkeit, resilienzfördernde linguistische, kulturelle oder identitätsbezogene Resignifikationen zu fördern.

Vor diesem Hintergrund erkundet der konsequent interdisziplinär ausgerichtete Band die Schnittstellen zwischen Medizin, Migration und künstlerischem Ausdruck. Dabei verharren die Beiträge nicht bei (migrationsassoziierten) Verlusterfahrungen, sondern zeigen Möglichkeiten der heilsamen Artikulation des Unsagbaren und Ungesagten in unterschiedlichsten Kunstformen (Literatur, Tanz, Social-Media, etc.) auf. Gleichzeitig sensibilisieren sie für eine kultursensitive Medizin, weshalb sie nicht nur Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaftler:innen, sondern auch medizinisches Personal adressieren.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111201566
ISBN:: 9783111201566
ISBN:: 9783111202662
ISBN:: 9783111201177
Fachgebiet:: Kulturwissenschaften
Fachgebiet:: Allgemeine Kulturwissenschaften
Fachgebiet:: Literaturwissenschaft
Fachgebiet:: Literaturwissenschaft, allgemein
Verlag:: De Gruyter

Buch Open Access 2024

Centenarians’ Autobiographies

Age, Life Writing and the Enigma of Extreme Longevity

Mita Banerjee

Band 2 in dieser Reihe

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Situated at the intersection between medical humanities, aging studies, autobiographical studies, disability studies and ethic studies, this book explores the fascination of centenarians' autobiographies for humanites research. It can be argued that the growing presence of centenarians' autobiographies on book markets across the globe may by rooted in the public's desire for positive images of aging, in contrast to the image of inevitable decay.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110769579
ISBN:: 9783110769579
ISBN:: 9783110769418
ISBN:: 9783110769647
Fachgebiet:: Kulturwissenschaften
Fachgebiet:: Ausgewählte Themen in den Kulturwissenschaften
Fachgebiet:: Aging Studies
Fachgebiet:: Literaturwissenschaft
Fachgebiet:: Gattungen und Medien
Fachgebiet:: Biographie und Autobiographie
Verlag:: De Gruyter

Buch 2023

Psychotherapy, the Alchemical Imagination and Metaphors of Substance

Alan Bleakley

Band 1 in dieser Reihe

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Alchemy is popularly viewed as a secret way of turning worthless base metal into gold, and then a precursor to modern chemistry. This is often taken as a metaphor for psychological development. This book describes an innovative "third way" for both the education and exercise of an alchemical imagination that embraces both material matters and psychological insight: alchemy as lyrical poetics, or the intensive production of embodied metaphor. Alchemy here is viewed as an immanent set of metaphor-driven "best practices" for indwelling complex and contradictory earthly matters in a sensual, artistic and humane manner. Or, again, it describes best psychotherapeutic practice. Alchemy is read not as a medium for "personal growth", but optimal co-existence with the natural world. It is an eco-logical rather than ego-logical project with deep aesthetic concerns (education of the senses in close noticing) and political intentions (a democracy of worldly things). The book echoes post-Freudian developments in psychoanalysis that avoid the mysticism of symbol systems to work rather with everyday signs and linguistic registers such as embodied metaphors, keeping the focus on known and sensed phenomena rather than abstractions.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111157368
ISBN:: 9783111157368
ISBN:: 9783111159904
ISBN:: 9783111154770
Fachgebiet:: Literaturwissenschaft
Fachgebiet:: Literaturwissenschaft, allgemein
Verlag:: De Gruyter