Perhaps even more reassuring is the fact that throughout its history, The Lancet Oncology hasn't forgotten that it is a medical journal: a place where patients and their experiences of disease and ...treatment are as important to the meaning of published oncology as the binding efficacy of a new drug to its molecular target. ...it is here, in the development of robust patient pathways that reliably work in the organised chaos of real-world health care delivery, that I feel we have advanced furthest in the past 20 years. Cancer care, and of course all of medicine, is about the quality of our life (and death) experiences, as much as it is about bald figures of long-term survival and years of life “saved”. Medicine is indeed an art of the possible, as much as it is the application of science to ourselves.
Hanif Kureishi’s The Last Word (2014) is a fictional work that depicts the effort of a young journalist from London, Harry, to write the biography of a very famous author of Indian origin, Mamoon, ...who now lives in the quiet English countryside. Starting from the very beginning, with its symbolic title, the novel is built upon a metatextual framework as it discusses the power of words and narratives in a literary context. In particular, the thematic coordinates of the text incessantly creates intersections between the conceptual domain of writing, which includes its peripheral subdomains such as researching, remembering, but also the manipulation and revision of facts and stories. The overall effect is to hybridise the fields of narrative, (fictional) biography and authorship, and deliberately challenge the reader in the construction of meaning and the attribution of reliability to characters. Therefore, the governing megametaphor living is writing and its possible micro-articulations emerge as a network of rhetorical devices of representation and conceptualisation of life experience through the practice of writing and communicating. This paper intends to investigate the range of these metaphorical renditions in the novel, and their power to symbolically encapsulate lives in words (Mamoon’s life recorded and/or reinvented through words). The central argument is that such structures superficially serve to mirror reality and experience, blending the macro-concepts of writing and living, but in reality they are also endowed with the possibility to set off a sequence of ambiguities, given their ideological potential (i.e. biography writing as a process of adjustment and interpretation of facts in spite of claims of faithfulness). As readers are asked to apply a kind of “double vision” (Gavins 2007) to the text, various text worlds are generated, bringing to light the language continuum connecting the coterminous spaces of fiction and non-fiction and the key role of metaphor as a tool to approach the self and the other, and human existence at large. The purpose of this article is twofold, namely a) to take into account various metaphoric expressions originating from the central megametaphor in select extracts from the novel and b) to provide a preliminary examination of their ideological effects. Methodologically I follow an interdisciplinary frame that draws from stylistics, postcolonial discourse, biography studies and literary studies (Adami 2006; Ashcroft 2009; Bradford 1997; Browse 2016; Douthwaite 2000; Kövecses 2000, 2002; Stockwell 2009; Sorlin 2014).
In recent months, there has been a lot of debate surrounding the use of those COVID-19 vaccines that have been either tested or manufactured with cell lines that were isolated from the remains of an ...aborted fetal child. Most faithful and orthodox Catholic moral theologians, among whom I count myself, have concluded that their use is not intrinsically evil. Therefore, like every other decision that falls into the category of actions that are not intrinsically evil, the decision to be vaccinated with these morally controversial vaccines has to be governed by the virtue of prudence. It is a decision that calls for a wisdom that properly sees this action within the constellation of actions that propels the human agent to the heights of holiness. This is why prayer is so essential for authentic moral judgment. With prayer, we ask the Holy Spirit who is the all-prudent one to guide our actions so that we can choose and act well not only for our only well-being but for the well-being of all. Acts that are not themselves intrinsically evil are deemed virtuous or not within the narrative of the individual person’s life.
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