Copyright

Pascale Antolin

Published On

2022-10-11

Page Range

pp. 123–146

Language

  • 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.

Contributors

Pascale Antolin

(author)
Professor of American Literature and Head of CLIMAS at Université Bordeaux-Montaigne

Pascale Antolin is Professor of American Literature at Bordeaux Montaigne University, and head of the research group CLIMAS. A specialist of American modernism and naturalism, she has published books and articles on F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathanael West, Frank Norris and Stephen Crane. For several years now, she has focused her research on the representation of illness in literature and published numerous articles on the subject in French, European and American journals. Recently, she has developed a special interest in the neuronovel, and published several articles, a special issue of EJAS, and a Wiley encyclopedia entry on brain fiction.