Between 1990 and 2015, American literature saw the emergence of a new corpus of epilepsy metaphors which tackle the stigma of epilepsy within three areas: society, body, and language. Eleana Vaja introduces concepts such as protometaphors, relational metaphors, epileptic texts, and metastability to categorize and examine these foci further. Applying philosophy as well as "hard sciences" (i.e. mathematics, medicine, physics) to disability studies, her study of selected works by Siri Hustvedt, Thom Jones, Reif Larsen, Dennis Mahagin, Audrey Niffenegger, Rodman Philbrick, and Lauren Slater shows how epilepsy metaphors redefine the notion of the "liminal" and the "normal".
Price: $40.00
Pages: 256
Publisher: transcript publishing
Imprint: transcript publishing
Series: Lettre
Publication Date:
01 April 2018
Trim Size: 8.86 X 5.83 in
ISBN: 9783837641189
Format: Paperback
BISACs:
LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General, SOCIAL SCIENCE / People with Disabilities, LITERARY CRITICISM / General
Eleana Vaja (PhD) taught American literary and cultural studies at the University of Cologne. Her research interests include U.S. American literature, philosophy, and disability studies.
Frontmatter 1
Contents 5
Acknowledgments 7
Introduction 9
I.A Falling Asleep: The Stigma of Epilepsy in History 21
I.B American Literature: From Stigma to Metaphor? 39
I.C Ableist Metaphors: Historical Motifs and Normalcy 55
II.A Jürgen Link and Michel Foucault: Symptomatic Signification of Proto- and Flexmetaphors 69
II.B George Canguilhem: Vital Materiality and Relational Metaphors 81
II.C Gilbert Simondon: Transindividual Metastability and Conceptual Metaphors 95
III.A Metaphor and Society: Proto- and Flexmetaphors and Calculated Individuation 115
III.B Metaphor and Materiality: The Relational Body and Its Electric Individuation 157
III.C Metaphor and Idioms: Siri Hustvedt's Metastable Rhetoric as Transindividuation 191
Conclusion 235
Bibliography 239
