Digital Representations of Illness: Key Issues in Cancer Patient Narratives
Language has proven to possess tremendous power: words not only reflect our perception of the world, but they also have an impact on other people’s ideas (Foucault, 2002; Fairclough, 2003; Koller, 2017). This is especially significant in the case of health communication, which, in the last few years...
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Universidad de Alicante
2024-07-01
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| Series: | Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses |
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| Online Access: | https://raei.ua.es/article/view/27081 |
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| author | Jennifer Moreno |
| author_facet | Jennifer Moreno |
| author_sort | Jennifer Moreno |
| collection | DOAJ |
| description | Language has proven to possess tremendous power: words not only reflect our perception of the world, but they also have an impact on other people’s ideas (Foucault, 2002; Fairclough, 2003; Koller, 2017). This is especially significant in the case of health communication, which, in the last few years, has raised a particular interest as a result of the number of health-related discourses that have emerged on the Internet (Harvey, 2013; Brookes and Hunt, 2021). Exchanging information has become so easy and quick now that more and more people are starting to share their stories of illness, raising awareness and seeking for emotional support, which has highlighted the therapeutic role of storytelling (Conti, 2019). Given that cancer is the leading cause of death in the world (WHO, 2022), and considering the growing trend towards storytelling and the extraordinary power of language, the aim of this paper is to analyse how cancer patients use language in their narratives when describing their illness experiences. To conduct our analysis, we compiled a corpus of cancer narratives written in English and used corpus linguistic tools (McEnery and Hardie, 2012) such as Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al., 2014) to explore how cancer, illness, health, life and death are represented. Preliminary findings show that, although the word ‘cancer’ seems to be commonly used by English-speaking cancer patients, they do not often talk about death, especially about their own, suggesting that death may still be a taboo in our society. In addition, as reflected in their narratives, patients seem to change their life expectations, values and priorities after living with cancer. Furthermore, our findings suggest that patients may understand certain issues such as ‘being healthy’ differently from the general population. |
| format | Article |
| id | doaj-art-89ed6e7eccd54adb8dc378dedb23ff60 |
| institution | Kabale University |
| issn | 0214-4808 2171-861X |
| language | English |
| publishDate | 2024-07-01 |
| publisher | Universidad de Alicante |
| record_format | Article |
| series | Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses |
| spelling | doaj-art-89ed6e7eccd54adb8dc378dedb23ff602025-01-30T09:27:46ZengUniversidad de AlicanteRevista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses0214-48082171-861X2024-07-014122123810.14198/raei.2024.41.1035293Digital Representations of Illness: Key Issues in Cancer Patient NarrativesJennifer Moreno0https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9582-1658Universidad de ZaragozaLanguage has proven to possess tremendous power: words not only reflect our perception of the world, but they also have an impact on other people’s ideas (Foucault, 2002; Fairclough, 2003; Koller, 2017). This is especially significant in the case of health communication, which, in the last few years, has raised a particular interest as a result of the number of health-related discourses that have emerged on the Internet (Harvey, 2013; Brookes and Hunt, 2021). Exchanging information has become so easy and quick now that more and more people are starting to share their stories of illness, raising awareness and seeking for emotional support, which has highlighted the therapeutic role of storytelling (Conti, 2019). Given that cancer is the leading cause of death in the world (WHO, 2022), and considering the growing trend towards storytelling and the extraordinary power of language, the aim of this paper is to analyse how cancer patients use language in their narratives when describing their illness experiences. To conduct our analysis, we compiled a corpus of cancer narratives written in English and used corpus linguistic tools (McEnery and Hardie, 2012) such as Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al., 2014) to explore how cancer, illness, health, life and death are represented. Preliminary findings show that, although the word ‘cancer’ seems to be commonly used by English-speaking cancer patients, they do not often talk about death, especially about their own, suggesting that death may still be a taboo in our society. In addition, as reflected in their narratives, patients seem to change their life expectations, values and priorities after living with cancer. Furthermore, our findings suggest that patients may understand certain issues such as ‘being healthy’ differently from the general population.https://raei.ua.es/article/view/27081cancer languagecorpus linguisticspatient narrativesillness experience |
| spellingShingle | Jennifer Moreno Digital Representations of Illness: Key Issues in Cancer Patient Narratives Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses cancer language corpus linguistics patient narratives illness experience |
| title | Digital Representations of Illness: Key Issues in Cancer Patient Narratives |
| title_full | Digital Representations of Illness: Key Issues in Cancer Patient Narratives |
| title_fullStr | Digital Representations of Illness: Key Issues in Cancer Patient Narratives |
| title_full_unstemmed | Digital Representations of Illness: Key Issues in Cancer Patient Narratives |
| title_short | Digital Representations of Illness: Key Issues in Cancer Patient Narratives |
| title_sort | digital representations of illness key issues in cancer patient narratives |
| topic | cancer language corpus linguistics patient narratives illness experience |
| url | https://raei.ua.es/article/view/27081 |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT jennifermoreno digitalrepresentationsofillnesskeyissuesincancerpatientnarratives |