CLARIDGE, Mie Ørbæk (2026) Outside the Realm of Our Analogies: Reconfiguring Disease Metaphor in the Post-Anthropocene. Doctoral thesis, York St John University.
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Text (Doctoral thesis)
Outside the Realm of Our Analogies - Reconfiguring Disease Metaphor in the Post-Anthropocene.pdf - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives. | Preview |
Abstract
This thesis is inspired by Susan Sontag’s 1987 Illness as Metaphor, in which she warns against the demoralising consequences of using disease metaphorically. Sontag’s analysis of the metaphors of illnesses like TB and cancer reveals how certain aesthetics, values, and anxieties connected to these illnesses shape the experience of those who are literally or figuratively ill. While Sontag’s approach focuses on human experience, I will explore the consequences of speaking about non-human and posthuman beings through disease metaphor. I aim to bridge the gap between ecocriticism, literature, and the medical humanities to explore how disease, as a metaphor and discourse, promotes anthropocentric constructions of barriers that make it impossible to develop effective approaches to climate change. I have selected a range of works that engage speculatively with human ontologies to examine how their discursive reconfiguring of disease metaphor provides spaces to imagine a post anthropocentric coexistence with nature. This thesis will embark on a journey into the speculative worlds of these contemporary works to establish a framework for new modes of storytelling that is able to speak to experiences that exist outside the realm of our analogies. As the literary tradition into which these new stories will be told is constructed upon a foundational discourse of disease that promotes anthropocentric attitudes and ‘othering’, these must first be addressed and overcome. As Jeff VanderMeer highlights, we must ‘wrench [our] imaginations – and thus [our] analogies and metaphors – out of a grooved track that had been running through everyone’s minds for hundreds and hundreds of years’ (Authority, 113).
| Item Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Status: | Published |
| Subjects: | P Language and Literature > PR English literature |
| School/Department: | School of Humanities |
| URI: | https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/15408 |
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