This book examines writings by people living with Alzheimer's Disease and their caregivers. Its focus areas include the construction of the self in the face of diminishing linguistic and cognitive abilities, the stigmatization of ageing, the various narrative strategies that these texts (often collaborative) employ, the health activism and advocacy generated via a 'biosociality,' and the ethics of care. It examines the 'disease writing' genre about a condition that ravages the ability to use language. It serves as a "literary" examination of the work done in this area through a critical reading of the memoirs of those with AD and caregivers and a healthy dose of literary theory. The book is a valuable resource for those interested in literary and critical theory and researchers in the field of ageing/dementia studies.
Author(s): Pramod K Nayar
Publisher: Springer
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 166
City: Singapore
Preface
Acknowledgements
Contents
About the Author
1 Introduction: Reading Alzheimer’s
The Graying of the World
AD and Personhood
Representing Dementia and AD
2 The Wounded Self
The Uncanny Subject of AD
Uncanny Object Relations
Defamiliar Bodies and Discreditable Selves
The Zombie Within
The Autobiological and the Diagnostic Self
Passing: The AD Self in/as Masquerade
The Semiotic Subject
The Episodic Self
The Relational Self
3 The Wounded Narrative
The AD Dysnarrative
Degenerative Chronicity and Generative Toxicity
Performing Disease
The Decline Narrative of AD
The Uncanny in Decline Narratives
Decline Signs, from Past to Future
Towards a Reparative Narrative
Confabulation as Reparative Narrative
The Affectively Coherent Narrative
4 Biosociality, Biovalue, and the AD Commons
Activism, Advocacy, and the AD Commons
Health as Biovalue in the AD Commons
Research Objects and Somatic Responsibility
Complementary Knowledge and Affective-Effective Histories
Politicized Patienthood
Ethical Values as Biovalues
Circuits of Hope
Markets, Health, and Biovalue
5 Questions of Care
Care Labour and Work
Labour and Affective Labour
Care and Affectionate Knowing
The Anecdote as Heteroclite
Care Ethics and Politics
Pastoral Care and the Family
The Family as ‘Hidden’ Victim
Care, Biopower, Biopolitics
Care and Humanness
The ‘Exclusively Social’ Self
Reflective Presence, the Enduring Self and the Human
Bibliography
Index
