The Invading Body: Reading Illness Autobiographies

Overview

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.

About the Author:
Einat Avrahami is Adjunct Professor of English at Tel Aviv University in Israel

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