Treatments

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Creative expression inspired by disease has been criticized as a celebration of victimhood, unmediated personal experience, or just simply bad art. Despite debate, however, memoirs written about illness-particularly AIDS or cancer-have proliferated since the late twentieth century and occupy a highly influential place on the cultural landscape today. In Treatments, Lisa Diedrich considers illness narratives, demonstrating that these texts describe illness as an event that reflects wider cultural contexts, including race, gender, class, and sexuality. Diedrich begins by offering examples of midcentury memoirs of tuberculosis. She then looks at Susan Sontag's Illness As Metaphor, Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's "White Glasses." Through these records of intensely personal yet universal experience, Diedrich reveals how language both captures and fails to capture these "scenes of loss" and how illness narratives affect the literary, medical, and cultural contexts from which they arise. Finally, by examining the ways in which the sick speak and are spoken for, she argues for an ethics of failure-the revaluation of loss as creating new possibilities for how we live and die.