Rebecca Richardson
Winter 2015: Senior Seminar
In Sickness and in Health: Writing the Body
Medicine has recently taken a “narrative turn,” with doctors paying new attention to the
overlap between stories and case histories—in other words, how people organize their symptoms
and experiences into a narrative. But this scientific interest in narratives has a much longer history,
as medicine and psychiatry, from Galen to Freud, has always required close observation and
interpretation. Many literary figures have themselves trained for or practiced medicine, including
Keats and William Carlos Williams. In this class, we will consider the relation between these
methods of reading. What does it mean to read about others’ personal experiences and others’ pain?
Should doctors study narrative to understand their patients’ histories? Could literature be a training
ground for “bedside” empathy and sympathy? What’s at stake in using illness or disability as a
metaphor or source of emotional complication in literature and film? What can (or can’t) both
literature and science tell us about the body and mind, in sickness and in health? Drawing on recent
work in the medical humanities and disability studies, we will question the respective strengths and
limits of literature and science in representing embodied experience. Major texts will include
Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Sontag’s Illness As
Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, Freud’s Dora, Jean Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the
Butterfly, and Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn.
Learning Goals: To think critically about the distinctions and overlaps between disciplines; to
consider the mutual influence of scientific ideas about the body/mind/health/disease and
literature’s representation of them; to analyze the current state of medicine’s “narrative turn”; to
engage with theories of empathy, with disability studies, and with different models for close reading
and interpretation; to hone close reading and thesis-driven writing skills.
Required texts (also on reserve at the library, and many are also available online):
Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors
Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals
Katherine Anne Porter, Pale Horse Pale Rider
Jean Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Freud, Dora
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn
SCHEDULE
Representing the body in pain, illness, and disability:
Week 1:
Tuesday: Introductions. Mapping terms and concerns.
Thursday: Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych; Scarry, The Body in Pain (selections); Leder, The
Absent Body (selections).
Week 2:
Tuesday and Thursday: Brontë, Wuthering Heights and Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS
and Its Metaphors (selection on TB).
Week 3:
Tuesday: Brontë, Wuthering Heights cont. and selections from Martha Stoddard Holmes’s
Fictions of Affliction.
Thursday: Porter’s Pale Horse Pale Rider.
Week 4:
Lorde’s The Cancer Journals and Sontag cont. (on cancer).
Week 5:
Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and selections from The Disability Studies Reader
(Mitchell & Snyder on “Narrative Prosthesis” and Ato Quayson on “Aesthetic
Nervousness”); Tobin Siebers’s “Disability in Theory: From Social Constructionism to the
New Realism of the Body.”
PAPER 1 DUE FRIDAY
Representing the mind: hysteria, post-traumatic stress, and the neuro-novel
Week 6:
Tuesday: Freud’s Dora
Thursday: Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.”
Week 7:
Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway
Week 8:
Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn.
Medical narratives and poetics:
Week 9:
Williams, “Of Medicine and Poetry” and selections from The Doctor Stories.
Week 10:
Kathryn Montgomery’s “Literature, Literary Studies, and Medical Ethics: The
Interdisciplinary Question,” Leslie Jamison’s “The Empathy Exams,” and selections from
Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.
PAPER 2 DUE
Major assignments:
-
Regular responses to readings (20%)
Regular participation in class discussions (15%)
Journaling exercise and reflection (5%)
6 page essay developing / revising /expanding a response (25%)
Final 8-10 page essay developing/revising/expanding a response (35%)
Students with Documented Disabilities
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evaluate the request with required documentation, recommend reasonable accommodations,
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is needed to coordinate accommodations. The OAE is located at 563 Salvatierra Walk (phone:
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Honor Code
The Honor Code is the University's statement on academic integrity written by students in 1921.
It articulates University expectations of students and faculty in establishing and maintaining the
highest standards in academic work:
The Honor Code is an undertaking of the students, individually and collectively:
1.
That they will not give or receive aid in examinations; that they will not give or receive
unpermitted aid in class work, in the preparation of reports, or in any other work that is to
be used by the instructor as the basis of grading;
2.
That they will do their share and take an active part in seeing to it that others as well as
themselves uphold the spirit and letter of the Honor Code.
The faculty on its part manifests its confidence in the honor of its students by refraining from
proctoring examinations and from taking unusual and unreasonable precautions to prevent the
forms of dishonesty mentioned above. The faculty will also avoid, as far as practicable, academic
procedures that create temptations to violate the Honor Code. While the faculty alone has the
right and obligation to set academic requirements, the students and faculty will work together to
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