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Resource type: Journal Article Language: en: English Peer reviewed BibTeX citation key: Venkatesa2015 Email resource to friend View all bibliographic details |
Categories: General Keywords: "Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person", Autobiography, Engelberg. Miriam, Humor, Illness, USA Creators: Kasthuri, Venkatesan Collection: Gnosis |
Views: 20/874
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Attachments | URLs https://www.academ ... A_Memoir_in_Comics |
Abstract |
Mainstream breast cancer narratives are mostly angry or sentimental pathographies which either portray women as champions of their physiological dysfunction or infantilize them. Miriam Engelberg’s graphic pathography Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person: A Memoir in Comics (2006), on the contrary, reconfigures the normative representational economy of breast cancer through deploying humor and cartoons as primary mode of narration. In an interview on NPR, Engelberg explains her choice of comics as mode of expression thus: “somehow in the cartoon form, panel by panel, the absurdist part of this whole experience [breast cancer] comes out in a way that it wouldn’t if [one] were just writing an essay” (Engelberg). The present paper by close reading Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person: A Memoir in Comics investigates the use of humor and cartoons as a dominant form and further examines Engelberg’s philosophy of shallowness that enables her to confront her breasted experience.
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