Comparative Drama, September 22nd, 2002
This essay is an exercise in the bringing together of apparently disparate roles. I am an assistant professor of Renaissance literature, and I am a cancer patient. These two identities rarely overlap, since cancer has not proved a popular literary subject. As Susan Sontag notes, although nineteenth-century writers glamorized tubercular patients, "nobody conceives of cancer ... as a decorative, often lyrical death"; she adds that "cancer is a rare and still scandalous subject for poetry; and it seems unimaginable to aestheticize the disease." (1) Cancer's resistance to aesthetic rendering pos...
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