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This chapter will report on some of the issues raised by a major collaborative project conducted at UBC over the last five years, for which I was Principal Investigator, entitled ‘An Interdisciplinary Inquiry into Narratives of Disease, Disability, and Trauma’. This project brought together a dozen specialists from the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Health Sciences, to look at how narratives of disease, disability, and trauma are used and analysed. We also attempted to bridge the divide between academics undertaking research in these areas, community advocates and people representing their personal experiences through the arts. Some of the results will soon be published in a collection of essays provisionally entitled Unfitting Stories. The book is divided into three sections, focusing on what we came to see as the three major functions of narratives of disease, disability, and trauma: the aesthetic, therapeutic, and polemic. Bridging sections deal with methods of narrative analysis across the disciplines, and the intersections of these three functions as well as the overlap between disease, disability, and trauma. This presentation will focus on problems that arise when engaging in crossdisciplinary discussions involving very different uses of the term ‘narrative’ and a wide range of methods of dissection and interpretation of stories told by both patients and health care professionals. I will illustrate one way in which we managed to engage in effective dialogue by summarizing a multidisciplinary approach to the way narrative functions in Margaret Edson’s highly successful play about a woman dying of cancer, Wit. Using a model for the functions of communication developed by linguist Roman Jakobson, we were able to better understand how this play can provoke very different reactions from the perspectives of cancer patients and their families, health care professionals, those with a religious faith, and academics engaged in literary or feminist research. It also serves, as a drama, to illustrate the differences between performance and performativity, when narrative representations deal with issues of identity and agency in relation to communication through language or other means.
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