Spreading Interdisciplinary Contaminations:
New Perspectives on Health, Illness, and Disease

Co-editors:
Girolamo Tessuto (University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli)
Clark Lawlor (Northumbria University)
Ilaria Natali (University of Florence)
Annalisa Federici (Roma Tre University)

Copy editors:
Maria Micaela Coppola (University of Trento)
John Gilbert (University of Florence)

The intersections between medicine and communication, both oral and written, have been recognised and discussed at least since the time of Hippocrates, who is often credited with having conceptualised the practice of healing as a semiotic craft (Baer 1988: 37; Danesi and Zukowski 2019: 5). Nonetheless, in the academic field, exchanges among literature, linguistics, and medical sciences intensified only during the 1940s and 1950s, with a progressive shift of focus away from the physician’s skills in deciphering signs and symptoms to the semiotic acts of communication to represent, perform, explain, and make sense of health and disease – and the subject’s experience of them – in real and fictional contexts. Even more recent are interdisciplinary critical orientations developing in the areas of linguistics and literary inquiries, with seminal studies by Felman (1985), Kleinman (1988), Ingram (1991), Roberts and Porter (1993), and Frank (1995). Together with perspectives such as feminism, queer theory, and disability studies, these orientations have paved the way for wellness and illness narratives to come to the forefront and disentangle themselves from the disciplinary “colonialism” of scientific discourse (Charon 2006; Jurecic 2012).
Far from being mere interpretations of bodily symptoms, the ideas of disease, illness, and pathology are often symbolically or metaphorically constructed (Sontag 1978; Graham and Sewell 1990; Semino et al. 2020; Garzone 2023) and always rooted in specific contexts and times. Hence, investigating their representations necessarily entails moving beyond physician-patient dynamics to cope with broader cultural and social concerns. Linguistic, literary, and cultural studies themselves can engage with medical representations to “reveal their function in their historical context” (Gilman 2011: 73; Gilman 1988), to emphasise their constitutive relation to identity and language, and to unveil their inherent connection with conceptualisations of a “healthy” body and mind (Ferrara 1994), thus challenging stigmas associated with various forms of disease, illness, disability, and trauma.
The intricacies of the mutual effects between language and human health have inspired scholars from different theoretical backgrounds to consider the public and private dimensions of discourse about health and healthcare across a wide and diverse range of contexts, genres, and media (Gwyn 2002; Furst 2003; Heritage and Maynard 2006; Harvey and Koteyko 2012; Skelton 2013; Canziani et al. 2014; Hamilton and Chou 2014; Mullini 2015; Hilger 2017; Garzone et al. 2019; Brookes and Hunt 2021; Lawlor and Mangham 2021; Tweedie and Johnson 2022), giving floor to “different types of discourses that go side by side with the linguistic practices of participants involved in the textual universe of medicine and healthcare” (Tessuto 2023: xvii). Accordingly, to explore the multiple and complex ways in which the complementary perspectives of linguistic, literary and cultural studies can interact critically with medical discourses, this issue of Textus encourages scholars to investigate a broad spectrum of “literariness” and health-related narratives, including letters, memoirs, (auto)pathographies, marginalia, mixed-media narratives, patientprovider interactions, case histories, medical blogs, as well as other liminal and interstitial forms of expression, textual
contaminations, and anomalies.
Suggested topics for this issue include, but are not limited to:
● past and present representational practices concerning health and the body;
● literature, medicine, and their reciprocal influences;
● the role of literature in creating/representing/challenging cultural discourses of physical and/or mental health, wellbeing, disease, and trauma;
● medical practitioners and/or patients as writers, narrators, and fictional characters;
● representations or narratives of disease, illness, health, disability, trauma, etc.;
● narratives of social injustice in medical practices and experiences;
● gender identity and medical discourse;
● dynamics of communication between doctors and patients across different genres, medias, and contexts;
● relationships between language, style, forms, and methods of literary research and medical discourse;
● impacts and implications of changes in technology-mediated healthcare communication;
● medical and therapeutic narratives and their relationship with healing;
● counter-narratives of mainstream conceptualisations of health and wellbeing.

Deadline for abstracts: 31 December 2023

Please submit your abstract of around 500 words to: Textus3.24@gmail.com

Acceptance of abstracts to be notified by 20 January 2024

Deadline for articles: 31 March 2024

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