2 research outputs found
Temporality and the carerās experience in the narrative ecology of illness:Susan Sontagās dying in photography and prose
This paper joins a discussion about the representational dissonance and commemorative ethics of two self-referential works that engage with Susan Sontagās2004 death from Myelodysplastic Syndrome: Annie Leibovitzās A Photographerās Life 1990ā2005 (2006) and David Rieļ¬ās Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Sonās Memoir (2008). Instead of approaching these two texts as testimonial accounts measured by standards of reliability and grace, this paper considers how the temporal dissonance produced by an incurable cancer diagnosis thwarts questions of personhood and ethical intention in Leibovitzās photography and Rieļ¬ ās prose. By contextualizing these works as the caregiversā experience of Sontagās illness, this paper reads them as attempts at gauging two distinct temporal perspectives that confound identiļ¬cationāthose of living through and of remembering terminal time