ABSTRACT

Through decades of scholarly analysis and application, the practice of illness narratives has been established as an effective therapeutic intervention for dealing with illness-related emotional well-being (Couser; Frank; Irvine and Charon). Scholars of illness narratives argue that the medium works to bring agency back to the body following the neoliberal relinquishing of one’s life story in the patient-physician encounter. Contemporary scholarly work is mapping the growth of illness narrative forms from the traditional book to emerging digital-born narratives; however, there is limited research on the medium’s intersection with virtual reality (VR) technologies. Working with Marie-Laure Ryan’s theoretical framework of possible worlds theory, this paper explores the transformative potential of VR illness narratives for pathologized identities found when VR resists the call to fall into one of two categories: pure transhumanism where VR reality is emancipated from actual reality or an artificial experience that has no lasting effect on the self.

摘要

通过数十年的学术分析和应用，疾病叙述的实践已被确立为一种有效的治疗干预措施，用于处理与疾病相关的情绪健康（Couser；Frank；Irvine 和 Charon）。疾病叙述的学者认为，在新自由主义在医患相遇中放弃了一个人的生活故事之后，这种媒介可以将能动性带回身体。当代学术工作正在将疾病叙事形式的发展从传统书籍映射到新兴的数字化叙事；然而，关于媒体与虚拟现实 (VR) 技术交叉的研究有限。使用 Marie-Laure Ryan 的可能世界理论的理论框架，