Illness uproots one's certainties, and therefore seems to ask for a new life narrative. While not everyone feels the need to tell a story of illness and (loss of) health, illness narratives have grown into a substantial literary genre of their own. There is a second way in which stories and illness have proven to be a fruitful combination: namely in how they make up a narrative medical ethics. It has become quite commonly accepted amongst medical practitioners that decisions (about treatment for example) should be informed by a patient's existential outlook, or their narrative framework, or their previous life decisions. This summer school wants to look at how illness and narrative constitute one another, both on an individual and a societal level, and at how insights from literary theory deepen or broaden standard conceptions of narrative ethics in health care.  

We will address questions such as: 

Do narratives help to cope with illness?  

Is our individual self-consciousness narratively structured? Or does illness rather expose the illusion of the narrative self?  

Do social imaginaries in western culture ignore the importance and inevitability of illness and death?  

Do we need new ways to represent what illness means to our self-understanding? 

Seminars and lectures will be given by Angela Woods, Havi Carel, Anna Gotlib, Daan Kenis, Arya Thampuran and the organizers of the summer school (Kristien Hens, Katrien Schaubroeck and Leni Van Goidsenhoven).