Going Under and Coming Round: Anesthesia, Narrative, and Trauma

General anesthesia is of course valued for sparing patients the physical pain and psychological trauma of being sensate and conscious during surgery, but it also poses a specific challenge to the narrative continuity often seen as a defining aspect of human identity and of mental health. The patient is (arguably) absented from the scene in which his or her body is (arguably) traumatized, and then returns to awareness to find a body that has been changed. This rupture in continuity presents a challenge to coherent first-person narration. Examining some of the strategies used by writers to represent the gap opened up by anesthesia, I suggest that such accounts illuminate our understanding of the connections between narrative rupture, trauma, and an ethical responsibility to recognize the possibility of sentience, and hence the capacity for suffering, in anaesthetized patients

Playing with fire : Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the rewriting of the Prometheus myth

Bibliography: pages xiv-xx.According to Greek myth, Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to mortals, either in the form of culture, or by using it to bring to life the clay people he had made. Margaret Homans distinguishes between what she calls literal and figurative creativity (1980:223). The woman who is a mother, creating literally and naturally with her body, and who writes, creating figurative offspring, cultural texts, makes use of the Promethean fire in both of its possible senses. Only the literal, however, is seen by patriarchal culture as her rightful realm. Myth dictates that only men received from Prometheus the fire of figurative creativity, of language. The "woman writer," then, as a kind of contradiction in terms, is forced to suffer the conflict imposed by her choice to create, within the dictates of culture, with both forms of "fire." In the face of this conflict, Alicia Ostriker suggests that the project of women writers should be to rewrite the mythology of patriarchy and, in doing so, take from men their sole possession of the fire of culture, an ownership which empowers them in the same way as it did Zeus, the tyrannical father-god. In her words, women writers should become "thieves of language, female Prometheuses" (1986:211). Women who re-write the Prometheus myth may then be seen as both figuratively revising the theft by re-telling its story, and as literally re-enacting the myth itself by rebelling against the limitations of androcentrism. The "female Prometheus" re-creates the myth, bringing together the definitions of herself as woman and writer in what I argue is a disruptive and positive form of hybridism. Chapter One examines the mythic complex which surrounds the figure of Prometheus, concentrating on the versions by Hesjod, Aeschylus and Ovid, and considers the implications of its appropriation and revision by women writers. Chapters Two and Three analyse the way in which two nineteenth century women, Mary Shelley and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, rewrote the myth. Shelley's novel, Frankenstein, presents two Promethean figures - the scientist and the monster - and so embodies the ambivalence of its author. Barrett Browning translated Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound twice, and then wrote Aurora Leigh, a hybrid novel-poem in which the central character is female, a writer and Promethean. I argue that both succeeded, in different ways, in liberating language from the limitations of the patriarchal symbolic, so carrying out a theft of linguistic "fire," the act recognised by Shaftesbury as a ''Breach of Omnipotence.

Medicine and the Silent Oracle: An Exercise in Uncertainty

This article describes a simple in-class exercise in reading and writing that, by asking participants to write their own endings for a short narrative taken from the Journal of the American Medical Association, prompts them to reflect on the problem of uncertainty in medicine and to apply the literary-critical techniques of close reading both to the content and the form of a story that describes and enacts the challenges of making decisions in the face of uncertain knowledge