Richard Selzer: the pen and the scalpel: a dialogic/rhetorical perspective on the life and writings of a surgeon/writer
Stripling, Mahala Yates
Stripling, Mahala Yates
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1997
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Abstract
Richard Selzer is a dialogic writer, having a text with a plural point of view. This Bakhtinian perspective on Selzer's life and work examines how no words filtering into the human consciousness are neutral and how remote dialogues are renewed in unending connections within the present. This circular process is documented in the manner Selzer's dialogicality of consciousnesses, born in Troy, New York, where he developed a doctor's consciousness at his father's knee and a writer's consciousness rooted in his mother's ambitions for him, are brought forward into his work today. Then, a clear picture of Selzer's transition, after the death of his father, through medical school, and of experiences in the Orient, illustrates the linguistic forces that helped to shape a doctor who wrote. Next, after practicing surgery for thirty-one years, when he could no longer look at the events of surgery with the dilated pupils of a writer, he metamorphosed into a full-time writer. Besides this cognitive accounting and dialogic orientation of language in past experience, an analysis of Selzer's witnessing imagination in case-history essays such as "Brute" and "The Abortion" show how he overlays literary subjectivity onto medical objectivity. An in-depth look at "Smoking's" carnivalesque translinguistics, illustrates how juxtaposed authoritative and metaphorical languages allow polyphonic potential to be realized. In "The Corpse," Selzer, poet of the body, combines organic orientation with analogous perception, demonstrating the seminal Emersonian ideal of natural circular association. Selzer's short stories such as "Impostor," "Whither Thou Goest," and "Imagine a Woman" converge counterparts (Selzer's past and present relationship with his father; biblical tales and modern transplantation; Ovid's metamorphosis technique with AIDS) and reveal a new dialogic aesthetic. Personal interviews with Selzer discuss Raising the Dead, a reinvention of his twenty-three day coma and near-death experience, his spiritual currency, on-going work, lectures, sermons, and New Haven "ministry." This sensitive study of how Selzer, a magnificent anachronism, processes the world and commingles past voices from Homer, Shakespeare, and Keats with his own ever-evolving hybrid languages, is applicable to ethnographic studies, and philosophical, linguistic, cognitive, psychological, and epistemological understanding.
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Subject
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Selzer, Richard, 1928-Surgeons--United States
Authors, American--20th century
Authors, American--20th century
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Dissertation
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vii, 262 leaves
Department
English