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Terminal anticipation: entanglements of affect and temporality in living with advanced cancer

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Abstract

Narrative approaches within the social sciences have tended to privilege narrative coherence, with the thematic and sequential progression of one’s story from beginning through middle to end often seen as a virtue and as a hallmark of strong narrative identity. Illness narratives, however, often disrupt this temporal order insofar as they render the future—and thus the narrative’s end—uncertain. Advanced cancer calls the duration, even possibility, of one’s future into question, challenging the normative construction of temporally coherent narratives. In this paper, we draw on recent work theorising contemporary orientations towards the future under the rubric of ‘anticipation’ to analyse the illness narratives and embodied experiences of people living with advanced cancer. We show how the lived experience of precarious selfhood produced in relation to uncertain futures resists coherent narrativisation. We argue that attending to the affective presence of the future in the present and challenging the normativity of narrative coherence are important dimensions of contemporary cancer narratives.

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Notes

  1. The moniker ‘timescapes’ also refers to a (now concluded) UK Economic and Social Research Council ‘Changing Lives and Times’ Initiative (Timescapes 2007–2012), which undertook a wide-ranging program of ‘qualitative enquiry conducted through or in relation to time’ (Neale et al. 2012. For an overview of the project see: http://www.timescapes.leeds.ac.uk/). Across diverse projects and empirical sites, the timescapes project used a qualitative longitudinal approach to foreground ‘timescapes’—‘a temporal vista that brings into focus a micro-temporal view of the world [in order to]… give insight into the dynamic unfolding of real lives’ (Holland 2011).

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Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the interview participants and the financial support of the Australian Research Council. Funding for this research was provided by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant (DP150100414) and an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellowship (DE150100285).

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Correspondence to Katherine Kenny.

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Kenny, K., Broom, A., Kirby, E. et al. Terminal anticipation: entanglements of affect and temporality in living with advanced cancer. Subjectivity 10, 374–392 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-017-0034-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-017-0034-x

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