Pedagogy and the Art of Death: Reparative Readings of Death and Dying in Margaret Edson ’s Wit

AbstractWit explores modes of reading representations of death and dying, both through the play ’s sustained engagement with Donne’sHoly Sonnets and through Vivian ’s self-reflexive approach to her illness and death. I argue that the play dramatizes reparative readings, a term coined by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to describe an alternative to the paranoid reading practices that have come to dominate literary criticism. By analyzing the play’s reparative reading s of death and dying (as well as its representation of the shortcomings of paranoid readings), I show howWit provides lessons about knowledge-making and reading practices in the field of health humanities.

Source: Journal of Medical Humanities - August 10, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research