https://doi.org/10.7592/FEJF2021.83.monticelli ILLNESS: NARRATIVES, IMAGERY, AND POLITICS Remarks on a Seminar, an Exhibition, and a Conference Daniele Monticelli Professor of Semiotics and Translation Studies School of Humanities, Tallinn University, Estonia daniele.monticelli@tlu.ee Abstract: The article uses the review of a seminar, an exhibition, and a graduate conference, which took place at Tallinn University in the 2020–2021 academic year, as an occasion to reflect on the different ways in which illness has been represented in literature, the arts, and film across the history of Western culture. The specific focus of the article is on the theoretical contribution of the humanities to a more complex and adequate understanding of the phenomenon of illness. The study of illness narratives reveals different patterns and strategies of con- structing the illness experience into a coherent and meaningful story, but also the resistance that the disruptive impact of illness on our everyday lives poses to narrativisation. The complex historical imagery which endows the biological fact of being sick with additional cultural and social meaning has also to be criti- cally investigated in the humanities and social sciences. Metaphors about illness and the use of illness as a socio-political metaphor have often had a nefarious impact on sick people as well as entire social groups and communities. This is why the article also considers illness in its relations with politics and power and describes various attempts to empower sick people in their relations with medi- cal institutions and their social environment. The article ends with a review of the “Illness: Narratives, Imagery, Politics” graduate conference (27–28 January 2021), which is a good illustration of the many literary and artistic works and of the plurality of methods that can be used in the study of the illness phenomenon from a humanities perspective. Keywords: illness and metaphor, illness narratives, medical humanities, repre- sentation of suffering, the illness: narratives, imagery, politics conference Since spring 2020 we have been living in a global state of emergency that has deeply invested all the aspects of our personal and social life. Illness, which used to be in our experience rather a private and intimate issue, has suddenly become something that requires our common effort not only in terms DISCUSSION http://www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol83/monticelli.pdf