Society may not want to know about woundedness, or cancer, or mortality, but an increasing number of people are living beyond cancer treatment and being forced to confront precisely these things. Arthur Frank called ours a remission society: a place where many of us have had cancer and may pass as healthy citizens, but are in fact only on visas.
We require periodic checkups and know we could be expelled at any time. In such a context, it is even more urgent that those with cancer tell their stories.
“To use a metaphor at a time like this would be obscene”: a study of cancer, poetry and metaphor
This paper will examine the role of metaphor in relation to the scandal of cancer. It will consider the impact of metaphors drawn
from popular culture, biomedicine, alternative medicine, and the holistic health movement.
by Cathy Altmann
University of Melbourne
https://arts.monash.edu/__data/assets/p ... ltmann.pdf