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The Long or the Post of It? Temporality, Suffering, and Uncertainty in Narratives Following COVID-19

Cheston, Katharine; Cenedese, Marta-Laura; Woods, Angela

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Authors

Marta-Laura Cenedese



Abstract

Long COVID affects millions of individuals worldwide but remains poorly understood and contested. This article turns to accounts of patients' experiences to ask: What might narrative be doing both to long COVID and for those who live with the condition? What particular narrative strategies were present in 2020, as millions of people became ill, en masse, with a novel virus, which have prevailed three years after the first lockdowns? And what can this tell us about illness and narrative and about the importance of literary critical approaches to the topic in a digital, post-pandemic age? Through a close reading of journalist Lucy Adams's autobiographical accounts of long COVID, this article explores the interplay between individual illness narratives and the collective narrativizing (or making) of an illness. Our focus on temporality and suffering knits together the phenomenological and the social with the aim of opening up Adams's narrative and ascertaining a deeper understanding of what it means to live with the condition. Finally, we look to the stories currently circulating around long COVID and consider how illness narratives-and open, curious, patient-centered approaches to them-might shape medicine, patient involvement, and critical medical humanities research.

Citation

Cheston, K., Cenedese, M., & Woods, A. (2023). The Long or the Post of It? Temporality, Suffering, and Uncertainty in Narratives Following COVID-19. Journal of Medical Humanities, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-023-09824-y

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Sep 18, 2023
Online Publication Date Nov 14, 2023
Publication Date 2023
Deposit Date Nov 14, 2023
Publicly Available Date Nov 15, 2023
Journal Journal of Medical Humanities
Print ISSN 1041-3545
Publisher Springer
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-023-09824-y
Public URL https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1928828

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Licence
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.





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