Corpus Aegrotum. Pathology as a Literary Principle in Nancy by Bruno Lloret

Abstract

This paper proposes a media-theory and literary-materiality-based approach to Nancy, a novel published in 2015 by Chilean writer Bruno Lloret. Moreover, this study is to be understood as an experiment towards a dialogical philology, in which the author –in this case Lloret– is invited to comment on the paper. At the core of the observations stands the cancer that affects Nancy, the novel’s homo and intradiegetic narrator. Nancy’s illness is replicated semiotically and materially in the book, through the proliferation of non-verbal elements in the textual body. By interpreting verbal and non-verbal elements as symptoms of the protagonist’s illness, philological semiology and medical semiology become two complementary keys for understanding how pathology becomes a literary principle.