Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T00:23:59.009Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 13 - Joyce and the (Critical) Medical Humanities

from Part III - Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2022

Catherine Flynn
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
Get access

Summary

Vike Martina Plock’s chapter examines the interplay between medical science and humanist learning in Joyce’s writing. It is well known that Joyce had a life-long interest in medicine. His works resonate with descriptions of bodies in various stages of (ill-)health, and in recent years critics such as John Gordon, Vike Martina Plock, and Martin Bock have shown his responsiveness to a number of medical theories and interventions crucial to his time. As these studies illustrate, Joyce is often extremely critical of modern medicine’s merits, seeing it as yet another regulatory system that has the potential to organize and coerce. This chapter proposes to use debates and theories that have emerged in recent years in the Medical Humanities to investigate how Joyce’s texts reject the proposal to narrativize patients’ case histories. Critics such as Angela Woods have particularly challenged the role of realism in contemporary accounts of health and illness. Joyce, as this chapter argues, deliberately uses experimental narrative techniques to defy medicine’s urge to classify individuals according to pre-existing pathological labels. The representation of bodies in Joyce’s texts offer new ways of understanding cultures of medicine, disability studies, communities in crisis, bioethics, and public health.

Type
Chapter
Information
The New Joyce Studies , pp. 208 - 221
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×