Advancing Medical Posthumanism Through Twenty-First Century American Poetry

Tana Jean Welch

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9783031498879
• eBook ISBN:
  9783031498886
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Advancing Medical Posthumanism Through Twenty-First Century American Poetry places contemporary poetics in dialogue with posthumanism and biomedicine in order to create a framework for advancing a posthuman-affirmative ethics within the culture of medical practice. This book makes a case for a posthumanist understanding of the body—one that sees health and illness not as properties possessed by individual bodies, but as processes that connect bodies to their social and natural environment, shaping their capacity to act, think, and feel. Tana Jean Welch demonstrates how contemporary American poetry is specifically poised to develop a pathway toward a posthuman intervention in biomedicine, the field of medical humanities, medical discourse, and the value systems that guide U.S. healthcare in general. 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. “Poems Are Bodies That Remind Us We Have Bodies”: Poetry, Medical Posthumanism, and Ethical Practice
• 2. Entangled Species/Entangled Health: The Inclusive Poetics of Juliana Spahr
• 3. Health Inequity, Structural Racism, and the Trans-corporeal Ethics of Claudia Rankine’s Investigative Poetics
• 4. Language, Matter, Movement: Global Health Equity and the Anti-capitalist Poetics of Cathy Park Hong
• 5. Shared Suffering and Chronic Vulnerability in the Poetry of Brian Teare
• 6. Affirmative Medicine: The Queer Figurations of Sam Sax and Franny Choi
• 7. Coda: Affirmative Ethics, Entangled Knowing
• Back Matter