Illness as Defamiliarization: A Reading of Virginia Woolf’s “On Being Ill”

In the ongoing Covidian Age, classic disease narratives from Daniel Defoe through Mary Shelley to Cormac McCarthy and Stephen King have made a comeback. Explorations of the Arts and Humanities in representing and critiquing pathologies, the “sick role” and medicine, with apocalyptic, extinction, pandemic and other scenarios have also resurfaced. It is in this context that the Dept. of English puts together this Podcast eSeries.

Avishek Parui (PhD, Durham, UK) is Assistant Professor in English at IIT Madras and Associate Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy. His research interests include Memory Studies, Masculinity Studies, and Medical Humanities. He is the author of Postmodern Literatures (Orient Blackswan, 2018) and is currently contracted with Rowman & Littlefield for his second book titled Culture and the Literary: Matter, Metaphor, Memory.