Out of Time: Temporality, Form and Fugitive Care in Contemporary Literature and Culture

Abstract

Much of the scholarship on narratives of illness and death proceeds from the assumption such accounts offer universal insights into the human experience. This thesis challenges this assumption, highlighting the occlusions produced by dominant disciplinary and narrative approaches. This project recognises the ways in which those living lives conceptualised as ‘ungrievable’ and deathly are concealed by and yet support dominant narratives of dying. Focusing on experiences of the end-of-life in an extended contemporary period (1990 – present), and beginning with narrative form, this project moves outwards to consider what insights other genres might offer to understandings of illness and death in contexts of temporal incommensurability. I argue that an experimental orientation to genre disrupts and offers critical purchase on representations of death outside of normative temporality and normative embodiment. Indebted to and building upon formulations of fugitivity originating within Black studies, this project develops the concept of fugitive care, the ever-shifting offers and practices of care that exceed institutions of science, medicine and policing, arguing that experimental form foregrounds such practices. I draw on queer theory to explore dying that is conscious of a fraught relation to the linear progression of the life course, tracking the relationship between cancer and HIV/AIDS and formulations of kinship in Kathlyn Conway’s Ordinary Life (1997), Ruth Picardie’s Before I Say Goodbye (1998), Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work (1995) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s A Dialogue on Love (1999). Thinking with Édouard Glissant’s notion of ‘opacity’, I consider the double-bind of aspiring to legibility/visibility for the sudden deaths and the slow attrition of living while Black under the conditions of late capitalism in the US, through readings of Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying (2007) Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped (2013), Harryette Mullen’s poem ‘All She Wrote’ from the collection Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002), and Claudia Rankine’s epic poem Citizen (2014). Finally, responding to the conceptualisation of the ‘undying’ and ‘Zombie time’ within poet Anne Boyer’s and artist Martin O’Brien’s work respectively, I also consider the intersection between chronic illness and ecology in a time of environmental crisis increasingly and ambivalently conceptualised as apocalyptic, reading across Susanna Antonetta’s memoir Body Toxic (2001) and Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones (2011).