Reconsidering Dementia Narratives

Rebecca A. Bitenc completed her PhD on ‘Dementia Narratives in Contemporary Literature, Life-Writing and Film’ at Durham University, UK. Her research interests include critical medical humanities, narratology, and narrative ethics. She is a member of the Dementia and Cultural Narratives Network and the Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research. She has an M.A. in English, French and Psychology from Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Germany.

Acknowledgements; Preface; List of Illustrations; Introduction: Reconsidering Dementia Narratives; Two Starting Points; Why Narrative?; Biomedicine and the Cultural Meaning of Dementia; A Brief History of Dementia; Demography and Demonization; Reconsidering Dementia: Reparative Moves; The Alzheimer’s ‘Epidemic’: Care, Cost and Social Justice; Literary Dementia Studies and the Medical Humanities; Illness Narratives: Countering Master Narratives and Exploring the Experience of Illness; Outline of Chapters; Part I Storytelling, Experience and Empathy; Chapter 1 Narrating Experiences of Dementia: Embodied Selves, Embodied Communication; Embodied Selves, Embodied Communication; Inside Views: Life Writing by People with Early-Onset Dementia; Memory; Language; Perception, Movement and the Senses; Emotions and Cognition; Time; The Social World: Intimate Relationships and Strangers; The Experience of Flow in Dementia; From the Caregiver’s Perspective: Intersubjectivity in David Sieveking’s Documentary Vergiss Mein Nicht; Viewing Symptoms of Dementia; The Communicating Body in Film; Embodied Selves and Relational Selves; Conclusion; Chapter 2 From the Outside in? Experience and Empathy in Fictional Dementia Narratives; Still Alice: From Fiction to Film; Experiencing Dementia/Experimenting with the Novel; Out of Mind; House Mother Normal; The Unconsoled; Concluding Reflections on Narrative Empathy; Part II Life Writing, Self-Writing and Creating Identities; Chapter 3 Life Writing at the Limits: Narrative Identity and Counter-Narratives in Dementia; Narrative Identity in Dementia: Friend or Foe?; Reconsidering Master and Counter-Narratives; The Problem of Counter-Narratives in Dementia: Reading First-Person Accounts by People with Dementia; Coherence in ‘Broken’ Counter-Narratives: ‘Mrs Mill’ and Other Stories; Janet’s Story: Confabulation, Continuity, and Agency; Counter-Narratives in Context: The Editor’s Role; Conclusion; Chapter 4 Relational Identity in (Filial) Caregivers’ Memoirs; The Aesthetics, Ethics, and Politics of Caregivers’ Memoirs; Gender, Genre and the Self: Rethinking Relational Identity in Dementia; My Father’s Brain; Do You Remember Me? A Father, a Daughter, and a Search for the Self; Tangles: A Story about Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me; Conclusion; Part III Narrating Dementia/Rethinking Care; Chapter 5 Care-Writing Reconsidered: Towards a New Practice of Dementia Care; Exploring Caregivers’ Dilemmas; Care or Coercion? Autonomy in Dementia; ‘Bad Grooming’: Intimate Care in Dementia; ‘No Good Choices’: Institutionalisation in Dementia; Imagining Alternative Approaches in Dementia Care; Reconsidering Confabulation; The Power of Music; From Control to Letting Go: Being With vs. Symptom Management; Challenging Care Practice; Conclusion; Chapter 6 Making Readers Care: Bioethics and the Novel; Ethics and the Novel: Countering, Stereotyping and Disturbing; Scar Tissue: Biomedicine and the Hermeneutics of Selfhood; Narrative and Neuroimaging: Raising Epistemological Questions; House Mother Normal: Disturbing Care; Exploring Bioethics: ‘Living Through’ as ‘Thinking Through’; Still Alice: (Precedent) Autonomy and Suicide in Dementia; Mode, Medium and the Suicide Plot; Have the Men Had Enough? Gender and the Economies of Care; Conclusion; Dementia Narratives and Beyond; Index