Abstract
Concussion Episodes is a creative-critical PhD project that examines representations of brain injury across medical literature, life writing, fiction, and poetry. It explores the representational tendencies of each genre and their role in medicine and literature’s co-production of understandings of brain injury. While medical literature seeks to standardise the definitions of mild Traumatic Brain Injury and concussion and to establish improved diagnostic and treatment paradigms, it does not address what it is like to live with brain injury from the patient’s perspective. By contrast, literary genres sometimes represent the internal experience of brain injury, as well as the socio-cultural status of the brain-injured individual. Life writing enables patients to voice their perspective but tends to exclude the experiences of patients which do not fit the marketable narrative of overcoming injury. Fiction includes a greater diversity of representations and occasionally uses unconventional narrative structures to depict the altered cognition of a brain-injured protagonist; however, fictional representations sometimes contain stereotypes and inaccuracies about brain injury that contribute to cultural biases. Contemporary poetry uses fragmentation and disjunction to capture the trauma of the brain-injury experience and explore the difficulty of retaining a sense of self while being the object of medical attention. Concussion Episodes argues for both diverse and accurate representations of brain injury and suggests that a hybrid approach that blends aspects of different genres—from medical literature to poetry—is one means of achieving a more holistic understanding of brain injury. The concluding poetry manuscript takes just such a hybrid approach, deploying embodied and fragmented narrative to represent the author’s lived experience of a concussion.