Copyright
Pascale AntolinPublished On
2022-10-11Page Range
pp. 123–146Language
- English
5. To Be or Not to Be a Patient
Challenging Biomedical Categories in Joshua Ferris’s The Unnamed
- Pascale Antolin (author)
Chapter of: Life, Re-Scaled: The Biological Imagination in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Performance(pp. 123–146)
This chapter shows to what extent the undiagnosed condition of Ferris’s main protagonist in The Unnamed provokes a questioning of medical classifications and contemporary neurological reduction. With his compulsive walking, the lawyer turns into a tramp. As he is both well-off and homeless, ‘normate’ and disabled, he destabilizes social categories. Writing a syndrome novel without any identified syndrome, borrowing from Dickinson’s poetry and the Naturalist novel, Ferris also challenges literary genres and conventions.