title: Seeing through The Bell Jar: investigating linguistic patterns of psychological disorder.
abstract: As a means of conveying difficult personal experiences, illness narratives and their analysis have the potential to increase awareness of patients' lives and circumstances. Becoming sensitised to the linguistic texture of narrative offers readers a means of increasing narrative understanding. Using the fictional narrative of The Bell Jar, this paper outlines a novel method for exploring the language of illness narratives. Corpus stylistics provides new insights into narrative texture and demonstrates the importance of recurrent linguistic features in shaping meaning. The paper concludes by proposing the application of a similar methodology to non-fictional illness narratives in therapeutic contexts.
authors: School of English Studies, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK. aexdjh1@nottingham.ac.uk
authors: Daniel
authors: D
authors: Hunt
authors: Ronald
authors: R
authors: Carter
mesh_terms: D004739:England; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D008093:Literature, Modern; D008513:Medicine in Literature; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000523:psychology*; D019365:Metaphor; D010469:Perceptual Distortion; D011573:Psychoanalytic Interpretation; D012660:Semantics; D012803:Sick Role; D012918:Social Alienation / Q000523:psychology*; D013405:Suicide / Q000523:psychology*