Senskadenes språk : Litterære fremstillinger av senskader etter kreftbehandling

Abstract

The Language of Late Effects: Literary Representations of Late Effects after Cancer Treatment is a master’s thesis in Nordic literature. The thesis examines narratives about late effects after cancer. This literary genre is relatively new. Ina Nordic perspective, there can be traced a development in these kinds of narratives since 2015.Most of them are biographical/autobiographical or based on the authors’ own experiences. The intention of the thesis is three-parted. It inquires what stories exist within the genre, and how these stories are told. There is alsoa close reading of two of the books within the genre. These are Håvard Aagesens Ingemannsland (2017) and Birgit Arildsens At lande på livets bred som en anden (2018). The theoretical basis of the MA-thesis is medical humanities and narrative medicine. There are primarily two important theoretical focal points here. The first one is the role of metaphor in understanding illness experience. Here Susan Sontag’s Illness as metaphor (1978/1991) and Anne Hunsaker Hawkins’ Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography (1993/1999) are essential. The other point is the narrative structure of illness narratives. In this case, Arthur Frank’s The Wounded Storyteller (1995/2013) and Jackie Stacey’s Teratologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer (1997) are important. These theoretical viewpoints are supplemented by linguistic metaphor-theory and theory on self-presentation and biography. These contribute to analytical precision.