Editors' Preface: Cancer Stories

In the twentieth century, cancer exceeded its discursive boundaries as a biological entity and became the focus of intense cultural interest. Shifting relations between patients and medical practitioners promoted not only the flowering of cancer narratives, but also helped to create the conditions whereby the narrative of cancer as a cultural sign might be discussed and debated. The growing autonomy of patients, often in resistance to the authority of the medical gaze or to the inhumanity of medicalized settings, drove this interest—all while the number of illnesses identified as cancers increased, and an industry to serve stricken individuals expanded. This special issue of Literature and Medicine commemorates that complex turning point in the cultural study of cancer. Despite the prevalence of both story and cancer in the field of medical humanities, it is the first published collection of essays that takes "cancer stories" as its focus.

"Cancer Stories: The Impact of Narrative on a Modern Malady," the medical humanities symposium that generated most of the essays in this issue, was convened in November 2008 at Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis by Jane E. Schultz, Larry Cripe, and William Schneider. It was the first medical humanities event to draw together a lively and diverse group of academics, creative writers, and visual and performing artists under the rubric "cancer stories." The works from that symposium gathered here do not, strictly speaking, comprise a collection of stories about cancer. Rather, most of them critically investigate the cancer narratives that permeate contemporary culture in the form of novels, life writing, drama, films (commercial and public service), advertising, visual art, digital media, and so on. They represent a benchmark in the critical analysis of cancer culture, not to mention the critical study of narrative, especially the verbal, visual, performative, and material representations of auto/biographical illness experiences.

To be sure, medical humanities has always concerned itself with stories: broadly speaking, with the myriad patterns of narrative that inform and transmit cultural meanings of the human body and its care. Not surprisingly, given the pervasiveness of cancer as a human experience, cancer stories figure prominently in the canon of works to which medical humanities scholars have attended. By now, Frances Burney's mastectomy letter, Leo Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilych," and Margaret Edson's W;t are common touchstones, as are Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor, Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals, Barbara Ehrenreich's "Welcome to Cancerland," and Art Frank's At the Will of the Body. Other, less obvious, cancer stories have emerged as scholars and critics have broadened their understanding of illness narratives and those narratives' cultural coding. Many fictions and many forms of life writing from earlier centuries, for example, can be read as cancer stories, though the word "cancer" never once appears in them.¹

At the same time, the essays in this issue mark more recent additions to our set of cancer narrative touchpoints, additions such as Lorrie Moore's short story "Canonic Babbling in Peed Onk," monographs by Mary K. DeShazer and Jackie Stacey, and key critical essays by Diane Price Herndl, Catherine Belling, Sarah Lochlann Jain, and others. Readers will also find themselves introduced to less familiar texts, such as American Cancer Society educational films; Gabriela Arredondo's "disruptive" cancer narrative; Gretchen Case's "embodied research" enacted by her performance artwork Apotosis Is My Favorite Word; Jessica Tekla Les's Joseph Cornell box-inspired visual and tactile artworks (which might be called cancer boxes); and Chinese novelist Bi Shumin's yet to be translated novel Save the Breast.

So, even as contributors acknowledge a body of shared touchpoints—a sort of canon of cultural cancer artifacts that must be reckoned with—the collection as a whole also augurs that the canon is both established enough for productive critique and dynamic enough to grow. In particular, the two creative works by Case and Les disrupt and invigorate the more scholarly analyses of cancer stories by reminding us of the infinite ways of narrating cancer as illness, as experience, and as site of cultural meaning.

The degree to which the...