Graduate Student, School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics
PhD student
Thesis Title: The struggle for identity in coma literature.
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Dr Brendan Stone
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About
The representation of trauma in literature is widespread and wide-ranging, encompassing historical trauma and its impact upon memory, culture and identity, juxtaposed against the trauma of physical violence and abuse. This has led to much re-evaluation (from the early 1990s onwards), in the fields of literature, psychology and medicine, of the nature of trauma itself. The proposed project will demonstrate that there is a core area of trauma literature and research that has remained unexplored but which powerfully embodies the foundations of the subject and research to date: coma literature. This has led to the title of my proposal: “Waking is rising and dreaming is sinking”: the struggle for identity in coma literature.
There are several objectives I aim to achieve. Firstly, and chiefly throughout the thesis, I will be looking at how the struggle for identity manifests itself in coma literature, analysing both the trauma of the coma victim and the trauma of the victim’s family—the internal and external worlds of coma. Within this objective, I will be looking at representations within both marginal and mainstream texts.
The second objective will focus on how coma literature elucidates and develops theories surrounding the “self” and trauma, expounding the ideas of writers such as Judith Butler (2005), Cathy Caruth (1995/96), and Judith Herman (1997). Both these objectives will be achieved through text-based research, analysing coma literature through the lens of the theories of trauma as a whole. However, my third objective will take a different approach: I intend to analyse the relationship and connection between coma literature and real-life coma situations and experiences. As part of this field research, I am running reading/writing workshops with ex-coma patients, looking at their experiences and mapping these against those fictionalised within the literature I am analysing. Leading from this, I will establish a quarterly magazine that will invite contributions, both fictional and non-fictional, from ex-coma/brain injury patients, to provide a creative, public mouthpiece for their work.
My overall objective is to evaluate why there is such a fascination with coma literature, looking at the ethical issues of writing about cognitive disability and assessing the fascination authors have with the coma experience. This is imperative when assessing whether or not fiction is propagating false mythologies about the overall coma experience. Ultimately, this would lead to the analysis of coma as a socio-historical metaphor for shifting conditions of the self and society, an idea which will draw from the insights of Susan Sontag on illness as metaphor (1978).
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