"Contemplated Madness:" Dementia as Defense Mechanism in Lily Brooks-Dalton’s Good Morning, Midnight
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Popular discourse usually represents dementia as a pitiable experience of loss and degeneration. Lily Brooks-Dalton’s 2016 novel, Good Morning, Midnight, instead presents dementia as a richly productive life experience, capable of transforming relationships and facilitating growth. This article takes up scholarship in three disability studies subfields—disability gain, cognitive disability, and animality—along with Robert Hariman’s theory of allegory in order to explain how dementia allows Brooks-Dalton’s protagonist not only to cope with bewildering life circumstances and the limits of normative time, but ultimately to restore his capacity for connection through the power of allegorical composition.
Source: Disability Studies Quarterly
DOI: 10.18061/dsq.6366
Author: Sarah Manley
Institution: Mount Tamalpais College
Language: English
Subfield: Safety Research
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7117966950
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