The Invading Body |
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| Einat Avrahami |
| 224 pages, 6 x 9 |
| 29 b&w illustrations |
| Cloth 978-0-8139-2664-3 • $55.00 |
| Paper 978-0-8139-2665-0 • $19.50 |
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Widely debated in feminist, poststructuralist, and literary theory is the relationship between subjectivity and the body. Yet autobiographical criticism--an obvious place for testing this conceptual relationship--has lagged behind contemporary queries about the embodied self. In The Invading Body, Einat Avrahami corrects this deficiency by analyzing the genre of terminal illness autobiographies. These personal narratives challenge the world of self-writing in their power to question the assumption that autobiography--and the body--are products of cultural constructs and discursive practices. Their self-disclosures of symptoms, disabilities, and the physical and psychological pains of treatment, especially when combined with thoughts of further deterioration and imminent death, defy the theoretical formulations of identity and alter the definition of autobiography itself.
Avrahami investigates an array of autobiographical testimonies
of terminal illness ranging from Harold Brodkey's poignant account
of his struggle with AIDS to Hannah Wilke's and Jo Spence’s gripping
self-portraits of cancer. By challenging the artificial and contrived
skepticism that critics and theorists bring to their concepts
of the self, the author argues, these illness narratives constitute
an "invasion of the real," confronting the notions of self-representation
and self-invention on which current autobiographical studies are
based.
The author's examinations of these moving memoirs and photographs
will engage not only the growing field of disability studies,
but also a more general readership interested in the transition
that occurs when one’s body suddenly falls out of step with one’s
mind.
Einat Avrahami is Adjunct Professor of
English at Tel Aviv University, Israel.
