Publication details
"Taken Bad" : Conspiracism and/as Sickness in Diane Johnson’s The Shadow Knows
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| Year of publication | 2020 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Narratives of sickness, disease, and contagion have been weaved into stories to shine a light on social issues since the 19th century when Victorian authors became interested in utilizing scientific paradigms. As C. C. Tarr asserts in “Infectious Fictions” (2015), what is known as “plague fiction” has maintained significance as it “exposes the chaos of social breakdowns to reveal that the economic and ideological barriers that society constructs are easily conquered by indiscriminate and capricious forces” (142). As this paper explores, postmodern fiction – and particularly postmodern American fiction – frequently depicts sickness as already inherent in the society to shine a light on various symptoms of the condition of postmodernity. In fact, more often than not, postmodern fiction uses narratives of physical sickness to represent postmodern suffering and help distinguish between how it is experienced from different perspectives. In these works, sickness can take on a number of forms – it can be mental or physical, contagious or isolated, apparent or inconspicuous, violent or peaceful – as it is parallel to one of the most corrosive symptoms of the condition of postmodernity: paranoia. Diane Johnson’s 1974 feminist novel The Shadow Knows presents its reader with two female characters, N. and Ev, who in many ways embody this parallel. This paper explores how the parallel of N’s conspiracism and Ev’s sickness plays out in the novel’s narrative, proposing that it exposes the racial divide of America’s 1970s feminism through the dichotomy of the mind and the body. |
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