Chapter 4. Performing the self in illness narratives: The role of evidentiality

• Carolina Figueras Bates ^[1]
  1. [1] Universitat de Barcelona

     Universitat de Barcelona

     Barcelona, España

     
• Localización: Perspectives on Evidentiality in Spanish: Explorations across genres / coord. por Carolina Figueras Bates, Adrián Cabedo Nebot, 2018, ISBN 978-90-272-0088-4, págs. 73-106
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Narrating the personal experience of a chronic illness poses the challenge of reflecting on epistemic states and sources of evidence that shape the person´s past, present and future selves. To explore the role of evidentials in different illness stories, 32 unsolicited narratives of eating disorders (ED), 28 accounts of borderline personality disorder (BPD), and 29 testimonies of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) were selected from the Internet. The analysis revealed that, in ED narratives, the enactment of the self was realized via visual perception, and the body was construed as self. In BPD narratives, inner emotional states were adopted as the source of evidence, and the mood was defined as self. In CFS narratives, the evidence informing the self came from embodied perception, and sensations were understood as self. Evidentials, therefore, are genre-sensitive and develop particular discursive functions in different illness narratives.