Medicalisation and beyond: the social construction of insomnia and snoring in the news

What role do the media play in the medicalization of sleep problems? This article, based on a British Academy funded project, uses qualitative textual analysis to examine representations of insomnia and snoring in a large representative sample of newspaper articles taken from the UK national press from the mid-1980s to the present day. Constructed as ‘common problems’ in the population at large, insomnia and snoring we show are differentially located in terms of medicalizing—healthicizing discourses and debates. Our findings also suggest important differences in the gendered construction of these problems and in terms of tabloid and ‘broadsheet’ newspaper coverage of these issues. Newspaper constructions of sleep, it is concluded, are complex, depending on both the ‘problem’ and the paper in question.

'Das Land das/man nur barfuss betreten darf':zu W.G. Sebalds Lyrik

This essay aims at an overview of W. G. Sebald's lyrical production, a hitherto neglected area of research. The article examines poetry's role in the works of Sebald and focuses in particular on texts published posthumously from his literary estate, as well as on pieces printed in various scattered sources from 1964 up to his death in 2001. The main thematic focus in this cross-section of Sebald's lyrical writings is a motif that likewise typified his fictional works: the topic of travel. In addition my survey of Sebald's poetry is complemented by a study of those texts revolving around the motif of insomnia. Death, a dominant theme in Sebald's lyrical works, as it was in his fiction, concludes my essay. © 2014 John Wiley and Sons Ltd.