Illness As Metaphor - Tumblr Posts

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place. I want to describe, not what it is really like to emigrate to the kingdom of the ill and live there, but the punitive or sentimental fantasies concocted about that situation: not real geography, but stereotypes of national character. My subject is not physical illness itself but the uses of illness as a figure or metaphor. My point 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. Yet it is hardly possible to take up one's residence in the kingdom of the ill unprejudiced by the lurid metaphors with which it has been landscaped. It is towards an elucidation of those metaphors, and a liberation from them, that I dedicate this enquiry.

Preface to ‘Illness as Metaphor’, Susan Sontag (1978)

Embodiment and Empathy and my sprawling ideas...

So somehow my thesis on explaining how comics is an inherently empathetic medium has descended into an interdisciplinary dissertation that encompasses the fields of neuroscience and cognitive processing, medical humanities, disability studies, art therapy and the theory of art. The application of these theories seeks to analyse the embodied aspect of comics, but I feel like my tutors will be surprised when they read it given that it is the final piece of coursework towards my Masters in Literature.

Also, you can tell I've got a high word count, because I'm talking like this. ^