Disease and the American Experience

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This class is dedicated to the contemplation and analysis of American (in the hemispheric sense) narratives that trace the trajectory of outbreaks of widespread illness to their subsequent mitigation. A major source of reflection and analysis will be the instructors experience nursing in an ICU during the first and second COVID-19 surges in New York City. Drawing upon literature, film, philosophy, history, and medical science, the focus will be on medicine and healing as a hinge point between politics and life. The class will analyze medicine as power; specifically, in what Michel Foucault described as biopower or ?making live and letting die.? In short, we will study theories, practices and stories of healing. However, instead of focusing on European texts such as Bocaccios The Decameron (1353), Shelley's The Last Man (1826), or Albert Camus's The Plague (1947), this class draws on the tensions between the Eurocentric canon and its deconstruction in the Americas (Machado de Assis, Bellatin, Cuarón, Poe, Cazals, Porter). These tensions manifest at the points where bare life and political life converge, where class, race, geography, and the economics of healing complicate an intervention so simple as quarantine. Nevertheless, and as the COVID-19 pandemic has shown us, some whose daily circulation provide essential goods and services to society cannot afford to quarantine, and it is their stories that fall outside the scope of Europe's literary grasp.