Life sentences: Articulating recoveries in fiction and nonfiction narrative prose

Abstract

This hybrid critical-creative thesis explores representations of mobility and immobility in complex narrative literary prose, to assess how these representations contribute to the development of critical thought concerning the nature, symbolic meaning and value of movement in human lived experience. The thesis approaches this topic by considering the meaning and role of embodied states of immobility, stasis and paralysis in a selection of narrative fiction and non-fiction texts. It considers mobility impairment holistically, as a bio-psycho-social phenomenon affecting body, mind, emotions and spirit. The overarching goal of this investigation into representations of mobility and immobility in literary narrative prose is to assess the particular strengths of complex literary narrative expressions, in comparison with medical and philosophical approaches, in furthering understanding of the subjective experience of immobility and impaired mobility. The thesis explores a concept that surfaces with relative frequency, expressed in different ways across different modes of literary discourse, which is that readerly or writerly engagement with a complex literary narrative may constitute, in itself, an important ‘mobilising technique’ which facilitates personal health and wellbeing. The thesis argues that complex literary narrative texts have rich capacity to challenge conventional western liberal notions of mobility, and offer empowering resources for the facilitation and support of adaptive recovery from states of immobility in real life, howsoever that immobility manifests in lived human experience.