Nursing and Narrative

Catalog description

This class is for and about nurses, and it considers how narrative form intersects with the profession. First, we will study how nurses have been depicted in works of literature and film. What cultural values do these women embody? What made nursing a stereotypically feminine profession, and have present-day nurses escaped the gender stereotypes that have hounded them for more than a century? Texts include Cherry Ames, Student Nurse; Sue Barton, Senior Nurse; One Flew Over the Cuckoo?s Nest and The Knick. Second, we will read pathographies, or stories about illness. How is illness disempowering and how does it challenge a patient?s ability to communicate? What kinds of illness experiences exceed language? How do patients view nurses? How do race, class, and gender affect a person?s experience of illness, treatment, and recovery? Texts include Frances Burney?s 1811 account of her radical mastectomy, ?The Yellow Wallpaper,? Dalton Trumbo?s Johnny Got His Gun, and the short film Emma Wants to Live. Third, we read narratives written by nurses about their work and identities. Narratives surround nurses as patients their stories, nurses chart their shiftwork and narrate differently for doctors, colleagues, patients and their families, and nurses build personal narratives as they reflect on their trajectory from student to practitioner. Thus, we will read texts about how communication and language are central to nursing and how nurses use narrative to affirm the work they do. Finally, we examine how dementia and dying affect language and present nurses with unparalleled communication challenges. The actively dying frequently speak in metaphors. How can nurses respond to those metaphors and advocate for the dying? Similarly, demented patients can speak in fragmented, seemingly nonsensical ways. How can we listen for the intention within the speech to increase patients'…