SUBVERTING RESILIENCE IN THE PSYCHIATRIC WARD: FINDING THE GOOD DEATH IN MIRIAM TOEWS’S ALL MY PUNY SORROWS

• Authors: López-Serrano Lucía
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This article posits that Miriam Toews’s All My Puny Sorrows (2014) introduces a critique of how neoliberal visions of resilience have permeated medical discourses on mental health, resulting in a perceived moral imperative over the patient to improve, which the author counters with a model of resilience firmly rooted in interdependence and the social potential of vulnerability. Toews’s focus on the narrator Yolandi’s struggle with the aftermath of her sister’s suicide also troubles the concept of resilience by introducing the idea of assisted suicide as a possible iteration of a “good death”, completely circumventing any possibility of recovery or adaptation. What holds the key for Yolandi’s recovery and happiness, Toews seems to imply, is accepting her sister’s rejection of resilience as a viable option.

Keywords

EN

CANADIAN LITERATURE; HEALTH HUMANITIES; RESILIENCE; SUICIDE; MIRIAM TOEWS

• Publisher: Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences
• Journal: World Literature Studies
• Year: 2023
• Volume: 15
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 44 – 55

Contributors

author

López-Serrano Lucía

• Department of English Philology, Faculty of Philology, Universidad de Salamanca, C/ Placentinos 18, 37008 Salamanca, Spain

• https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2283-5917

Identifiers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.31577/WLS.2023.15.2.4