Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: In this article, I argue that iconographic pathography provides a transformational form of storytelling for ill persons and the communities around them. This work addresses the reduction of illness narration to clinical vocabularies. It targets often excluded communities—chronic and terminal narrators—as well as promotes ethical practices of creative and collaborative inclusion for ecclesial communities. I use Devan Stahl’s Imaging and Imagining Illness as an example of this distinctive form of pathography, first differentiating it from other narrative forms of the genre as well as contextualizing its decentralized narrational form with criteria drawn from icons’ emergence within early Christian art. I claim that such decentralized narration changes the trajectory of self-understanding for the ill person as well as the ethical response required for those who bear witness to such narratives.
Source: Horizons
DOI: 10.1017/hor.2024.26
Author: Kristen Drahos
Institution: Baylor University
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4404698038