Navigating Deficiency and Excess : Ethical Challenges and Affordances of Auto/Biographical Narratives of Desperate Care
Bernhardsson, Katarina LU and Hultman, Anna LU
(2026)
In Yearbook of English Studies
56(1).
p.121-137
- Abstract
- This article examines narratives of care, i.e. artistic representations and explorations of caregiving relationships, with particular attention to their ethical dimensions. Focusing on two contemporary auto/biographical works depicting mother-daughter relationships — Marie Tillman's graphic novel En trasig historia( A Broken Story, 2020) and Sara Gordan's prose work Natten( The Night, 2022) — the article explores ethical challenges in narrating care and how care narratives contribute to and nuance discussions on the ethics of care. The analysis centres on what we term desperate care: an informal caregiving relationship in which life is perceived to be at risk and the care is urgent, anxious and, at times, done against the recipient's will.... (More)
- This article examines narratives of care, i.e. artistic representations and explorations of caregiving relationships, with particular attention to their ethical dimensions. Focusing on two contemporary auto/biographical works depicting mother-daughter relationships — Marie Tillman's graphic novel En trasig historia( A Broken Story, 2020) and Sara Gordan's prose work Natten( The Night, 2022) — the article explores ethical challenges in narrating care and how care narratives contribute to and nuance discussions on the ethics of care. The analysis centres on what we term desperate care: an informal caregiving relationship in which life is perceived to be at risk and the care is urgent, anxious and, at times, done against the recipient's will. Narratives of desperate care present ethical difficulties in representing vulnerable others. The article analyses textual strategies aimed at alleviating these challenges and highlighting the 'story of the story' through genre ambiguity, self-reflexivity, and accentuating the narrative as composition. The article relates the analysis of the works to key arguments in care ethics, considering both excess, manifested in excessive responsibility and hyper-attentiveness, and deficiency, evident in limitations of competence and responsiveness. These works foreground the dependency and interconnectedness of the mother-daughter bond while challenging idealized conceptions of the dyadic care relationship through on the one hand exaggeration and on the other inversion. Finally, the analysis reveals ethical affordances in the narratives' critical engagement with particular, contextualized forms of dependency. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
https://lup.lub.lu.se/record/1a2ecc58-899d-446b-8500-13b87f557e52
- author
- Bernhardsson, Katarina
LU
and Hultman, Anna
LU
- organization
- publishing date
- 2026-08-11
- type
- Contribution to journal
- publication status
- published
- subject
- in
- Yearbook of English Studies
- volume
- 56
- issue
- 1
- pages
- 17 pages
- publisher
- Modern Humanities Research Association
- ISSN
- 0306-2473
- DOI
- 10.1353/yes.00031
- language
- English
- LU publication?
- yes
- additional info
- Special Issue: What Remains? Literature and Ethics.
- id
- 1a2ecc58-899d-446b-8500-13b87f557e52
- date added to LUP
- 2026-01-23 16:19:41
- date last changed
- 2026-08-27 12:02:59
@article{1a2ecc58-899d-446b-8500-13b87f557e52,
abstract = {{This article examines narratives of care, i.e. artistic representations and explorations of caregiving relationships, with particular attention to their ethical dimensions. Focusing on two contemporary auto/biographical works depicting mother-daughter relationships — Marie Tillman's graphic novel En trasig historia( A Broken Story, 2020) and Sara Gordan's prose work Natten( The Night, 2022) — the article explores ethical challenges in narrating care and how care narratives contribute to and nuance discussions on the ethics of care. The analysis centres on what we term desperate care: an informal caregiving relationship in which life is perceived to be at risk and the care is urgent, anxious and, at times, done against the recipient's will. Narratives of desperate care present ethical difficulties in representing vulnerable others. The article analyses textual strategies aimed at alleviating these challenges and highlighting the 'story of the story' through genre ambiguity, self-reflexivity, and accentuating the narrative as composition. The article relates the analysis of the works to key arguments in care ethics, considering both excess, manifested in excessive responsibility and hyper-attentiveness, and deficiency, evident in limitations of competence and responsiveness. These works foreground the dependency and interconnectedness of the mother-daughter bond while challenging idealized conceptions of the dyadic care relationship through on the one hand exaggeration and on the other inversion. Finally, the analysis reveals ethical affordances in the narratives' critical engagement with particular, contextualized forms of dependency.}},
author = {{Bernhardsson, Katarina and Hultman, Anna}},
issn = {{0306-2473}},
language = {{eng}},
month = {{08}},
number = {{1}},
pages = {{121--137}},
publisher = {{Modern Humanities Research Association}},
series = {{Yearbook of English Studies}},
title = {{Navigating Deficiency and Excess : Ethical Challenges and Affordances of Auto/Biographical Narratives of Desperate Care}},
url = {{http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/yes.00031}},
doi = {{10.1353/yes.00031}},
volume = {{56}},
year = {{2026}},
}