Abstract
As a means of conveying difficult personal experiences, illness narratives and their analysis have the potential to increase awareness of patients’ lives and circumstances. Becoming sensitised to the linguistic texture of narrative offers readers a means of increasing narrative understanding. Using the fictional narrative of The Bell Jar, this paper outlines a novel method for exploring the language of illness narratives. Corpus stylistics provides new insights into narrative texture and demonstrates the importance of recurrent linguistic features in shaping meaning. The paper concludes by proposing the application of a similar methodology to non-fictional illness narratives in therapeutic contexts.
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Notes
See Charon, “Narrative Medicine: A Model for Empathy, Reflection, Profession, and Trust,” Journal of the American Medical Association 286 (15) (2001): 1897–1902; Skelton, Macleod and Thomas, “Teaching literature and medicine to medical students, part II: why literature and medicine,” The Lancet 356 (2000): 2001–2003; and Boudreau, Cassell and Fuks, “A healing curriculum,” Medical Education 41 (2007): 1193–1201.
See Watt, The Rise of the Novel (London: Pimlico, 2000); and Hunter, Before Novels—The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth Century English Fiction (New York: W.W Norton & Company, 1990).
The Brown Corpus was the first computer-readable corpus of English, created in 1961 and totalling around 1 million words. It contains samples of American English from a range of genres including news stories, published books on religion, leisure activities, academic and political texts and imaginative writing. Three subsequent additions to the Brown Corpus family have provided comparable samples of British English from 1961 and British and American English from the early 1990’s, thus sampling English across decades and continents. The reference corpus used here is the imaginative prose sections from all four corpora.
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Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge funding from the Leverhulme Trust in supporting this project (Grant reference F/00114/AN). We also thank Kevin Harvey and two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable recommendations on previous drafts of this paper.
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Hunt, D., Carter, R. Seeing through The Bell Jar: Investigating Linguistic Patterns of Psychological Disorder. J Med Humanit 33, 27–39 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-011-9163-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-011-9163-3