Editor
Dr. Brandon McFarlane
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
7-8-2020
Keywords
creativity, the creative turn, health humanities, medical humanities, emergency, illness narrative, memoir, short story, physician writing, Jay Baruch, Arthur Frank, Don DeLillo, crisis, literary studies
Abstract
This essay offers a critical examination of creativity discourse at the intersection of two disciplinary fields: health and humanities. In contrast to creativity’s longstanding associations with making, imitation, or invention, we examine the relatively recent emergence of what we call creativity’s preparatory capacity, particularly within critical discussions of healthcare and illness narratives. Working with fictional representations of the emergency room in physician-writer Jay Baruch’s short story collection Fourteen Stories: Doctors, Patients, and Other Strangers (2007), we identify how particular narrative techniques are revealed in a range of emergency scenarios—both within and beyond the fictional setting—and what such deployments of creativity might signal for the future of literary studies more broadly.
Faculty
Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences (FHASS)
Journal
University of Toronto Quarterly
Issue
Special Issue on The Creative Humanities
Version
Pre-print
Peer Reviewed/Refereed Publication
yes
Copyright
© Andrea Charise and Stefan Krecsy
Terms of Use
Terms of Use for Works posted in SOURCE.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
SOURCE Citation
Charise, Andrea and Krecsy, Stefan, "The Manual of Disaster: Creativity, Preparedness, and Writing the Emergency Room" (2020). Creative Humanities Special Issues. 4.
https://source.sheridancollege.ca/fhass_creative_humanities/4