Global ETD Search

1	Alzheimer's Disease Narratives and the Myth of Human Being Rieske, Tegan Echo 11 December 2012 (has links) Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The ‘loss of self’ trope is a pervasive shorthand for the prototypical process of Alzheimer's disease (AD) in the popular imagination. Turned into an effect of disease, the disappearance of the self accommodates a biomedical story of progressive deterioration and the further medicalization of AD, a process which has been storied as an organic pathology affecting the brain or, more recently, a matter of genetic calamity. This biomedical discourse of AD provides a generic framework for the disease and is reproduced in its illness narratives. The disappearance of self is a mythic element in AD narratives; it necessarily assumes the existence of a singular and coherent entity which, from the outside, can be counted as both belonging to and representing an individual person. The loss of self, as the rhetorical locus of AD narrative, limits the privatization of the experience and reinscribes cultural storylines---storylines about what it means to be a human person. The loss of self as it occurs in AD narratives functions most effectively in reasserting the presence of the human self, in contrast to an anonymous, inhuman nonself; as AD discourse details a loss of self, it necessarily follows that the thing which is lost (the self) always already existed. The private, narrative self of individual experience thus functions as proxy to a collective human identity predicated upon exceptionalism: an escape from nature and the conditions of the corporeal environment. Dementia Alzheimer's disease Illness Narrative Metaphysics Bioethics Medicine Self Story Hero myth Cartesian ego Nature Evolution Brain Mind Body Nonself Self (Philosophy) Self in literature Alzheimer's disease Alzheimer's disease -- Fiction Autobiographical memory in literature First person narrative Heroes -- Mythology Knowledge, Theory of Metaphysics Consciousness Bioethics Narration (Rhetoric) Thought and thinking Dementia Existentialism Self-perception Phenomenology Nonbeing Ontology

Search results

Alzheimer's Disease Narratives and the Myth of Human Being