Moral Storytelling in Illness Narratives

Examines how didactic illness narratives use rhetorical and ethical strategies to produce formally sophisticated and culturally significant moral storytelling.

This book explores the rhetorical and ethical dynamics of didactic illness narratives, including works by Audre Lorde, Philip Roth, and Sara Maguso, focusing in particular on how these narratives defy prevailing critical notions about the formal and cultural value of moral storytelling. Didactic illness narratives have long been viewed with suspicion or outright ignored by critics. Moral Storytelling in Illness Narratives: Dialogue, Subjectivity, Justice seeks to disrupt this consensus by demonstrating that many formally and politically sophisticated narratives have clear didactic purposes and that, when they achieve these purposes, they do important cultural work.

This book focuses on questions related to the value, study, and interpretation of illness narratives. How can we make sense of the choice to write an illness narrative with a didactic purpose? If we accept that this choice is not a priori aesthetically naive or ethically problematic, what interpretive questions become available to us? For example, what rhetorical strategies do these authors use to create a potentially acceptable link between the experience of illness and some moral truth? How do the authors define “moral”? How do the authors preempt readers’ potential resistance to or ambivalence about such a narrative strategy? And how do they develop the requisite moral authority necessary for such a risky narrative maneuver?
In answering these questions, this book argues that it is possible both to critique coercive moralizing about illness and to understand the formally innovative ways moral storytelling occurs in contemporary illness narratives. The book offers scholars in the health humanities, narrative theory, and literary studies the opportunity to explore the often underdiscussed cultural and literary work of didactic storytelling, both within illness narratives in particular and in contemporary literature in general.