16 RüdigerKunow
not discuss conceptual or positional oppositions as irreconcilable or
irrelevant (as for example deconstruction does) but holds them in
productive tension so that human biology can reveal cultural fault lines
and grievances just as cultural formations can be the means by which
biology as structure and knowledge manifests itself. With regard to the
possible role of biology, and especially the biology of the human body,
for research projects in the Humanities—and more particularly for
American Cultural Studies—two different vectors of interest must be
differentiated, as the following brief overview will show. First, various
Humanities disciplines have developed a sustained attentiveness to how
biological procedures of intervention or fact-finding in medicine^11 and
other life sciences are influenced by, even dependent on, cultural
agendasandresources.Especiallytheroleofmetaphorandtheenabling
functions of narrative have long been the objects of intense debates (S.
Beck, Birkle, Clark, MLA Biocultures Forum, Rabinow). This interest
can address a whole range of modes of representation now in use in a
variety of discursive practices. These include literary science writing,
non-fictionsciencewriting,biologicaljournalism,andothers.Following
themotto"storiescanheal,"theyhavealsoservedasthebasisforsome
new academic disciplines or sub-disciplines such as the Medical
Humanities (S. A. Banks and E. A. Vastyan, Philip K. Wilson),
Literature and Medicine (Carmen Birkle, Rebecca Garden—plus the
journal of that name), Narrative Medicine (Rita Charon), Cultural
Studies of Science (Cecilia Asberg and Nike Lykke), and, very rarely,
AmericanCulturalStudies(KarlaF.C.Holloway,JohnCarlosRowein
the U.S., Ruth Mayer, Sabine Sielke in Germany). This list and the
names it contains are of course far from complete. Even so, they
document a wide-ranging interest with themaieutic presence of the
cultural in the biological. Culture is here something like biology's
handmaiden, providing scripts, images, tropes, or story types allowing
biological or biomedical research and its findings to enter the public
domaininintelligiblewaysandforms.
(^11) ThisistheprovinceproperoftheMedicalHumanities,predicatedontheview
that "[m]edicine needs history and culture because... [c]ulture shapes the
disease, diagnosis and therapy, situation of the patient, and activity of the
physician" (von Engelhardt qtd. in Birkle ix); more about this particular
discipliningbelow.