Hosanna Krienke
Doctoral Student, English Department
Graduate Affiliate, MH&B Program
Northwestern University
“What connection can there be?”: Narrative Medicine, Network Theory, and the Victorian Novel
Henry James famously described nineteenth-century novels as “large, loose, baggy monsters.” Novels from this period have meandering plots, include scores of characters, span hundreds of pages, and depict a bewildering mix of crucial plot points and incidental detail. This talk will focus on Charles Dickens’s masterpiece Bleak House (1852-3), a thousand-page novel with over seventy characters. I will describe how narratology deals with such large-scale narratives through the framework of network theory, a model which I argue can be usefully applied to contemporary efforts to theorize a narrative approach to medicine. While current narrative medicine often focuses on individuals’ life stories, Victorian novels and network theory formulate a way to articulate not just stories of the self, but stories about social interaction and complex systems.