4th Global Conference
 |
 |
 |
Monday 4th July - Thursday 7th July 2005
Mansfield College, Oxford
Conference Programme, Abstracts & Papers
Session 1: Metaphor, Narrative and the Meaning of Experience
Chair: Peter Twohig
Finding Meaning through Metaphors: Following a Narrative Thread
from Experience to Research to Classroom
Jasna Krmpotić Schwind
Applied Arts and Health Sciences, Centennial College, Toronto, Ontario,
Canada
Life is made up of experiences, which are shaped through
the stories we tell of them. It is through these narratives that we “articulate
and understand ourselves” and the world around us (Sorrell, 1994,
p. 65-66). In my doctoral work (Schwind, 2004) I explored, through the
process of narrative inquiry, the experience of personal serious illness
of three nurse-teachers. The multidimensional nature of narrative inquiry
(Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) helps us, through its reflective process,
to reconstruct these past experiences, glean new meaning from them in
the present moment, and by so doing affect our future ways of being in
the world. By the way of personal stories, metaphors, letters, poems,
and drawings my co-participants and I were able to explore our individual
relationships with our respective illnesses. For example, Ruth’s
liver wrote her a “forgiveness letter” in form of a poem,
Elizabeth was able to express her life with lupus through a series of
drawings depicting herself as a flower, I in turn wrote myself a letter
from my “messenger tumour”. All three of us revisited our
illness events through the buffer of metaphor, which allowed each of
us to “broach a painful situation and turn it on its head in order
to examine it more closely and make sense of it” (Schwind, 2003,
p. 28). Metaphors thus may serve as useful tools that help us “make
connections between a concept that is difficult to grasp, such as a serious
illness, and a similar one that we are already comfortable and more familiar
with” (Schwind, 2003, p. 24).
In summary, I believe that the reflective
process of narrative inquiry brings to the fore the learning that can arise
from purposeful self-exploration that results in change and growth, not
only in ourselves, but in the healing of those in our care.
Illness: The Redefinition of Self and Relationships
Mary Didelot & Lisa
Hollingsworth
Department of Education, Purdue University, United States of America
Illness is a perceptual phenomenon: It is far more
than a complex physiological element. This was further posited by Lord
John Habgood who stated, “…that
life events are more important than our genetic inheritance and that
we must take the whole of what we are into account.” There exists
an objective and subjective duality to illness. The objective portion
is the disease itself. The subjective nature is that of illness, or the
experience of being ill.
Recognizing that, as Nietzsche had, “we…are
not free to divide body from soul,” a pivotal question is begged.
How can the sick define themselves (discover meaning) in the experience
of illness which causes suffering? Accepting Wolf’s position that “a
diagnosis is a statement about what we would like to be different about
our existence,” the disease can serve initially as an impetus
for self-discovery through the suffering of illness. Enduring the
journey from illness to health is uniquely dependent upon the meaning
intentionally attached to the suffering.
Viktor Frankl, a physician,
was able to create meaning of senseless suffering. His philosophical
stance incorporated in logotherapy can give those who are ill the freedom
to define themselves instead of allowing medical professionals and
medical conditions the power of definition. More importantly, Frankl’s will
to meaning can support
those who are experiencing illness to bring dignity to their suffering
and help them to endure their conditions through awareness and compassion
for themselves and others. As Frankl wrote, “He who has a why to
live can bear almost any how.
Metaphors of Health, Illness and Disease in Margaret Atwood’s
Fiction
Teresa Gibert
Facultad de Filología, Universidad Nacional de Educación
a Distancia, Madrid, Spain
This paper explores the functional significance of the
metaphorical language used by Margaret Atwood in her novels and collections
of short stories in order to ascertain how one of our most influential
contemporary writers perceives health, illness, and disease. A close
analysis of the metaphors in Atwood’s fiction reveals her various
ways of approaching these multifaceted phenomena, which have always attracted
her attention and which she has treated from different perspectives.
Many
of Atwood’s metaphorical expressions involve illness and disease
either in the source domain or in the target domain, health being less
frequently evoked than its two counterparts. Plants and fruit constitute
the most commonly used source domains of Atwood’s metaphors that
place both healthy people and ill people in their target domains. For instance,
in Bluebeard’s Egg, Yvonne is described as “a plant – not
a sickly one, everybody comments on how healthy she always is – but
a rare one, which can flourish and even live only under certain conditions” (247).
Likewise, in Life Before Man, Auntie Muriel is conceptualised
as “their roots, their root, their twisted diseased old root” (121).
Similarly, a woman suffering from breast cancer has bad dreams in which “the
scar on her breast splits open like a diseased fruit” (Bodily
Harm 60).
Rather than resorting to conventional metaphorical expressions,
Atwood prefers to articulate the concept of illness by means of innovative
similes. Thus, in The Robber Bride , the author refers to how
Karen “could
see the illness spreading on her mother’s skin, like the hairs on
arms, gone out of control; like filaments of lighting, only very small
and slow” (294). Karen’s mother is one of the numerous maternal
figures who are presented as being afflicted with either real or imaginary
illness, such as the mother of the unnamed protagonist of Surfacing ,
whose children “ceased to take her illnesses seriously, they were
only natural phases, like cocoons” (29).
Atwood often places disease
in the target domain when she associates it metaphorically with many different
concepts, which include honesty (compared with psoriasis and hemorrhoids
in Bodily Harm (64)), the use
of swearwords (described as “a minor contagious disease, like chicken
pox” in Bluebeard’s Egg (20)), and even people who “spread
themselves like a virus” (Surfacing 123) or who “may
be catching” (The Handmaid’s Tale 19).