Presentation
I will be presenting a selection of 20th– and 21st-century British poems that all relate an experience of the hospital.
Grounded in the philosophy of care, the study of my corpus of poems rests on three interrelated aspects that are at the heart of hospitalization: as soon as he or she enters this so peculiar space, the patient’s social status is jeopardized; this social vulnerability is combined with a primarily physical experience, and with an intense ontological trial. And however one considers hospitalization (in its social, physical, or ontological dimensions), at some point or another it involves a feeling of alienation: the reduction to the sole status of a patient alienates the individual’s social identity; pain, treatment, alteration contribute to a feeling of physical alienation; and the end of the illusion of eternal health that is more or less violently revealed when one arrives in hospital gives way to an intense feeling of ontological alienation.
Continuer la lecture de « Elise Brault-Dreux : “there is poetry / all over the walls of oncology / and i want to get out” (Sarah Broom) »