There's a thing first-time readers like to point out about Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor. Technically, this manifesto about the pitfalls of using metaphor to describe illness starts with—well, some metaphors. “Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship,” Sontag (2001: 3) writes. “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.” Why begin by establishing the subject so vividly through figuration if the “point” we are to learn is that “illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness—and the healthiest way of being ill—is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking” (3)? Sontag is playing, ventriloquizing the normative dependency, some say. (Is this camp?) It is simpler to read between the lines: we cannot really get by without metaphor—the key is not to deprive ourselves...
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
Book Review|
July 01 2022
Contingent Figure: Chronic Pain and Queer Embodiment
Michael Snediker,
Contingent Figure: Chronic Pain and Queer Embodiment
, Minneapolis
: University of Minnesota Press
, 2021
.
Don James McLaughlin
Don James McLaughlin is an assistant professor of nineteenth-century and early American literature at the University of Tulsa. His research explores intersections among American literature and the history of medicine and psychiatry, queer health, the LGBTQ past, disability studies, and the history of emotions. His writing has appeared in the peer-reviewed journals American Literature, Literature and Medicine, and J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, as well as the New Republic and Lapham's Quarterly.
Search for other works by this author on:
Genre (2022) 55 (2): 173–178.
Citation
Don James McLaughlin; Contingent Figure: Chronic Pain and Queer Embodiment. Genre 1 July 2022; 55 (2): 173–178. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00166928-10001440
Download citation file:
Advertisement
154
Views