The patient as reader

Abstract

Illness narratives can be said to reclaim the voice of the patient, and while they draw much of their strength from a position of experience and loss, they are also highly mediated and constructed narratives. This article studies, how these textual self-representations are formed in relation to intertexts, and how the authors explicitly use other literary texts and enter into a dialogue with them.
 Two pathographies are studied, Anders Paulrud’s Fjärilen i min hjärna (“The Butterfly in my Brain”, 2008) and Agneta Klingspor’s Stängt pga hälsosjäl (“Closed due to health reasons”, 2010, and their specific strategies in incorporating other literary texts: Paulrud through assemblage and community, and Klingspor through resistance and critique, especially of narratives the author feels she is supposed to appreciate. In the end, both authors seem to share a view about literature as potentially helpful and meaningful in conveying experiences and even point to a healing potential in narratives and literature.

Accounting for different rates of gender reanalysis among Icelandic masculine forms in plural -ur

“…In this connection, Icelandic exhibits significant correlation between the phonetic bases for inflection class membership and grammatical gender (Berg 2019), a factor generally acknowledged to determine the direction of inflection class shift and, often simultaneously, gender REANALYSIS (e.g. Bjorvand 1972Bjorvand , 1975Bernharðsson 2004; also Ralli 2002 on Modern Greek). The objective here is to account for the different rates at which masculine forms in NA.PL -ur are reanalysed as feminine on account of this correlation, as betrayed chiefly by use of the feminine definite article (DEF) NA.PL -nar, instead of expected masculine N.PL -nir, A.PL -na, but also (less frequently) by agreement with feminine modifiers.…”