Fall 2024 Special Topic: Literature & Medicine

Focusing on the intersections between literature and medicine, this course is for anyone curious about the cultural dimensions of medicine. With the help of literature, we will read and write about the enduring questions that arise around situations and experiences the body and mind undergo when sick, recovering, suffering, or dying. We will examine historical and visual texts that enhance our understanding of medicine and of literature, two discourses with affiliations that go back centuries.  Ranging over several centuries and cultures, the works selected help us define key historical moments as well as urgent contemporary issues with respect to the body, human and sometimes nonhuman. Collectively, the literary texts we will read illuminate the experience of illness (pain, suffering, sympathy etc.); explore the nature of medical practice and disease in various cultures and  the way the medical is intertwined with the politics underlying these realms of human experience;  provide a historical perspective on all of the foregoing. Texts will be drawn from different genres (fiction, essay, and drama), national cultures, and historical periods.  

This course satisfies the Genres or Theory requirment for English Majors. 

This course satisfies a Post-1800 Literature requirement for English Literature, English: TBD, English/Law 3+3, English/Journalism Majors.

This course satisfies the "One English Course in Writing, Linguistics, Critical Theory, Film or Literature" requirement for English Teaching Majors.