CALL FOR PAPERS

Narrative, Pain, and Suffering
Volume 23, Number 1
Issue Editors: Tod Chambers and Martha Stoddard-Holmes

Both medicine and literature are caught up in the problematics of pain: its verifiability (What does it mean to say that pain is authentic, imagined, hallucinated, or faked?); its relation to language and other expression (How does pain produce, strain, or erase representation?); its transgressive properties (Where might pain exceed the limits of an individual nervous system or undermine traditional categories of body and mind?); and its power to disrupt or to reconstitute selves and communities (What can we learn by regarding pain as performative or interpersonal?).

This special issue of Literature and Medicine will foreground pain, representation, and the social body—with a particular emphasis on clinical medicine. Clinical medicine is the site of topical, energized debates about pain management that engage questions of gender, race, class, and national or political identity. Questions also concern how pain differs from suffering and how clinical medicine might better address patient suffering. Additional questions focus on differences between acute and chronic pain or examine undertreatment and the gap between pharmacological relief and access to care. We encourage the submission of papers engaging any aspect of medical culture related to pain—including nonwestern medical cultures—such as medical rhetoric and the language of “compensation”; the physician-patient and physician-family relationship; and the difficult issue of assisted suicide, in which dehumanization through intolerable pain is a human experience and a core argument.

Deadline for submission: 15 May 2004

Manuscripts should be mailed to the address below and sent as an attachment to the email addresses below. Text and notes should be double-spaced and prepared according to guidelines in The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition. The manuscript should be accompanied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope with sufficient loose return postage and the author’s curriculum vitae. Literature and Medicine is a peer-reviewed journal. Authors’ names should appear only on a cover sheet and all identifiers in the text should be masked so that manuscripts can be reviewed anonymously. Manuscripts should be between 4,000 and 7,000 words of text in length. Literature and Medicine reviews only unpublished manuscripts that are not simultaneously under review for publication elsewhere. Direct all inquiries and manuscripts to:

mstoddar@csusm.edu, chambers@ias.edu

Send paper copies of manuscripts to: