| The purpose of this thesis is to establish the crucial importance of metaphor in cancer discourse and to analyze its resources, ambiguities and ambivalences in narratives of life with cancer, written in English and German. Primarily a comparative literary analysis, it involves a "synthetic" methodological approach. I examine not only the literary, but also the psychological and therapeutic properties of metaphors, drawing upon my literary training, my skills as a social scientist, and my practice as a nurse. This "therapeutic psychopoetics," as it were, is based on an empirical, cross-cultural study of metaphors in cancer discourse. Metaphors shape our ability to frame our experience. Because our meanings vary so radically, we need to analyze the range of metaphoricity in cancer discourse and map the resources of language for conceptualizing cancer.;Elaine Scarry (1985) has described the move from unspeakable pain to speech as the birth of language. In cancer, metaphor can help to make this birth of language possible. Appropriating the unknown, conveying the unspeakable through the known, metaphor provides the building blocks of language and narratives. A fuller awareness of this resource and its ambiguities can help us find patterns of narrative forms and language used to give voice to the experience of life with cancer and improve our sense of the complexity of problems involved in cancer therapy. (Abstract shortened by UMI.). |
