The Poetics and Politics of Alzheimer's Disease Life-Writing - S(h)ifting Dementia

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. 
This is the first book-length exploration of the thoughts and experiences expressed by dementia patients in published narratives over the last thirty years. It contrasts third-person caregiver and first-person patient accounts from different languages and a range of media, focusing on the poetical and political questions these narratives raise: what images do narrators appropriate; what narrative plot do they adapt; and how do they draw on established strategies of life-writing. It also analyses how these accounts engage with the culturally dominant Alzheimer's narrative that centres on dependence and vulnerability, and addresses how they relate to discourses of gender and aging. Linking literary scholarship to the medico-scientific understanding of dementia as a neurodegenerative condition, this book argues that, first, patients' articulations must be made central to dementia discourse;and second, committed alleviation of caregiver burden through social support systems and altered healthcare policies requires significantly altered views about aging, dementia, and Alzheimer's patients.

List of contents

Introduction: Critically Reading Dementia Narratives: Amplifying Advocacy.- Chapter 1: Of Wives and Daughters: The Stereotype of Caring Females?.- Chapter 2: From a "Care-Free" Distance: Sons Talking About Cultural Concepts.- Chapter 3: About Tradition and Triumph: Patients Popularise Dementia Narrative.- Chapter 4: On Reclaiming Authority: The Enabling Discourse of Alzheimer's Disease.- Conclusion: Dementia Narratives - Shifter of Perspectives and Values.- Bibliography.-  Works Cited.- Index.

About the author

Martina Zimmermann has fifteen years of research and teaching experience in Pharmacology, and is Privatdozentin at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. Her scholarly interests have increasingly shifted towards the Health Humanities: with an MA in Literature and Medicine, she currently researches for a book on dementia in Science, Medicine and Literature of the 20th Century at King’s College London, funded by the Wellcome Trust. Her personal website is www.martinazimmermann.org

Summary

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. 
This is the first book-length exploration of the thoughts and experiences expressed by dementia patients in published narratives over the last thirty years. It contrasts third-person caregiver and first-person patient accounts from different languages and a range of media, focusing on the poetical and political questions these narratives raise: what images do narrators appropriate; what narrative plot do they adapt; and how do they draw on established strategies of life-writing. It also analyses how these accounts engage with the culturally dominant Alzheimer’s narrative that centres on dependence and vulnerability, and addresses how they relate to discourses of gender and aging. Linking literary scholarship to the medico-scientific understanding of dementia as a neurodegenerative condition, this book argues that, first, patients’ articulations must be made central to dementia discourse;and second, committed alleviation of caregiver burden through social support systems and altered healthcare policies requires significantly altered views about aging, dementia, and Alzheimer’s patients.

Additional text

“Martina Zimmermann’s The Poetics and Politics of Alzheimer’s Disease Life-Writing is not only essential reading for anyone who has an interest in patient narratives or medical humanities broadly but is also helpful in changing the general cultural discourse that surrounds the ways in which Alzheimer’s patients are discussed. … the first study of many that seek to change the public discourse that surrounds one of our most marginalized populations.” (Kathryn Lafferty Danner, Journal of Medical Humanities, Vol. 42, 2021)

“Zimmermann’s study is the only monograph that critically examines Alzheimer’s narratives and as such, her book is an important contribution to the discourse on literary representations of the Alzheimer’s disease experience. … her work will benefit those medical humanities’ scholars who are interested in resisting the silencing tendencies of the medico-scientific discourse about dementia. … Zimmermann’s monograph continues the tradition ofhelping those who are students of the medical humanities cultivate more morally capacious ways of being in the world.” (Julie Kutac, Centre for Medical Humanities Durham University, centreformedicalhumanities.org, January, 2018)

Report

"Martina Zimmermann's The Poetics and Politics of Alzheimer's Disease Life-Writing is not only essential reading for anyone who has an interest in patient narratives or medical humanities broadly but is also helpful in changing the general cultural discourse that surrounds the ways in which Alzheimer's patients are discussed. ... the first study of many that seek to change the public discourse that surrounds one of our most marginalized populations." (Kathryn Lafferty Danner, Journal of Medical Humanities, Vol. 42, 2021)

"Zimmermann's study is the only monograph that critically examines Alzheimer's narratives and as such, her book is an important contribution to the discourse on literary representations of the Alzheimer's disease experience. ... her work will benefit those medical humanities' scholars who are interested in resisting the silencing tendencies of the medico-scientific discourse about dementia. ... Zimmermann's monograph continues the tradition ofhelping those who are students of the medical humanities cultivate more morally capacious ways of being in the world." (Julie Kutac, Centre for Medical Humanities Durham University, centreformedicalhumanities.org, January, 2018)

Product details

• Authors: Martina Zimmermann
• Publisher: Springer, Berlin
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 16.06.2017
• EAN: 9783319443874
• ISBN: 978-3-31-944387-4
• No. of pages: 167
• Dimensions: 154 mm x 216 mm x 16 mm
• Weight: 352 g
• Illustrations: VIII, 167 p.
• Series: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Europa, C, Literatur: Geschichte und Kritik, Literature, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature: history & criticism, Literature, Modern—20th century, Twentieth-Century Literature, British literature, British and Irish Literature