ENGL221

Humanities (HU)

Medical literature impacts everyone: we are all dual citizens of the kingdoms of health and sickness, of the everyday and the "night-side of life" as Susan Sontag puts it. Yet, throughout our varied stories about medicine, writers confront again and again the profound isolation and invisibility of the sick. What is it about physical pain that breaks down our language to describe it? How do medical narratives represent illness, giving structure and voice to this night-side of life? In this course, we explore medical texts by reading radically different writers across time, including Tolstoy, Shelley, and contemporary physicians. Throughout, we examine the myriad ways artists represent illness, through novels, poetry, short stories, autobiographies, films, guidebooks, and more. We work to unpack the binaries of sickness/health, normal/diseased, patient/doctor, and even life/death, in these stories about doctors, patients, epidemics, and mortality. After learning to "read" narratives of disease, students "write" disease, creating their own disease through an archive of texts.