Autopatografia

Abstract

The text takes as the subject-matter the concepts of patography and autopatography, understood as literary genres describing suffering and illness. The canon of patographic literature includes publications by Arthur Kleinman, Reconstructing Illness by Anne Hawkins, The Wounded Storyteller by Arthur W. Frank, and Recovering Bodies by Thomas Couser. The shared element of genres under analysis is the poetics of illness and the use of narrative strategies for rendering medical experience. The growing popularity and diversity of the so called “illness literature” makes it necessary to distinguish between auto- and patography, wherein autopatography constitutes – unlike patography – a narrative told by a person in illness, a patient, and a certain kind of an ill man’s autobiography (in the form of manifold ego-documents employing illness as the subject – epistles, diaries, memoirs etc.), a subjective narrative on disease.

Keywords

• pathography
• autopathography
• medical/illness experience
• stories of sickness
• narratives of illness
• narratives of suffering