Year: 2020
Type: article
Abstract: Behind the immediate pathophysiology of a medical condition often lies the emotional turmoil of an uncertain patient.As a result, many patients suffer from distressing thoughts and emotions, and their caregivers play an important role in comforting them.But to comfort a patient one must first have some framework to understand thoughts, emotions, and the relationship between the two.In this piece, the author draws from a collection of essays, Serious Noticing, written by the literary critic James Wood, to provide such a framework.In his work, Wood writes of 2 methods of reading literature, both embodied in the question: "What is at stake in this passage?"This framework is useful for both the analysis of literature and the understanding of psychological turmoil.Two Methods of Reading Literature In his recently published collection of essays, Serious Noticing: Selected Essays, 1997-2019, the Harvard professor and literary critic James Wood writes of 2 broad methods of reading literature. 1 Both are embodied in the question: "What is at stake in this passage?"This is not a question directly put by most physicians, I imagine, yet Wood's approach is instructive for those of us who, moved deeply by emotional suffering, seek new frameworks by which to understand the mental turmoil of our patients.Wood's first method of reading is deconstructive.When reading a piece of literature, he interprets a question originally posited by a mentor of his-"What's at stake in this passage?"-asasking: "What is at stake in maintaining the appearance of coherent meaning, in this performance we call literature?How is meaning wobbling, threatening to collapse into its repressions?"Here the critic seeks to determine how the meaning of a passage is different from what the reader, or indeed the author, might believe.Wood calls this method Stakes 1 : an approach that makes no assumptions that literature has coherent meaning in the first place; fosters no attempts to question the accuracy or distortion of that meaning; and certainly refrains from saying that the meaning should have been different from what it was.The content of a text per se, the direct interpretation of words on a page, is less important here than the understanding of how interpretations and words hold unexpected meanings or no meaning at all.
Source: The AMA Journal of Ethic
Author: Aldis H. Petriceks
Institution: Harvard University
Language: English
Subfield: Psychiatry and Mental health
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W3082914002