The Composite Body: Life, Materiality and Care in Contemporary German Life Writing about Chronic Illness

Katja Herges
German
UC Davis

This dissertation is the first comprehensive study of contemporary German life writing about illness and intervenes in the emerging field of Critical Medical Humanities. Drawing on a wide range of texts, including memoirs, diaries, blogs, autobiographical novels, documentary film, photography, and graphic memoirs, it moves beyond aesthetic and pedagogical analysis of life writing about illness and instead establish the genre as ontological inquiry into a materialist philosophy of life. Specifically, it argues that contemporary German illness life writing reveals how bodies are material agents that constantly affect and are affected through their encounters with humans and non-human bodies. This concept transforms traditional notions of embodiment in medicine and the humanities, in which bodies are either conceived as autonomous, as complex systems or as socially constructed. Rather than emphasizing the medical idea of loss, for example of mobility, of memory or of breasts, the life writers show how these painful material transformations offer potentialities for new encounters and becomings. This feminist materialist ontology has broad political and ethical implications for patient healthcare: Beyond the goal of the cure and restoration, the life writers envision care through the creation of good affects and well-being in assemblages of care.