Literature and Medicine

3.0 credits

Literature reveals and shapes how we interact with our bodies. For example, novels such as Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper (2004) reflects how military metaphors dominate our conception of cancer, determining diagnosis as the battle that patients face. But if we were to think of cancer as a pregnancy, as author J.M. Coeztee proposes in Age of Iron (1990), this would necessitate a different relationship: if we are made pregnant by cancer, the disease becomes a biological and cultural phenomenon, even a new part of our body. With this expectant metaphor, does the disease riddled with militaristic association suddenly become hopeful, even beautiful, in its own right? This is a controversial assertion but one this class will ask you to think about. In this seminar, we will analyze twentieth and twenty-first century literature including novels, essays, satire, and physician writing. We will map the thematic portrayals of bodies, illness/disability, patients, and clinicians through close reading of the texts’ formal features, and we will consider the implications of the past two decades’ enthusiastic uptake of literary concepts by the health professions for the purposes of enhancing clinical competencies such empathy and compassion. This class will interrogate these propositions by analyzing the role of literature in clinical and narrative medicine while also weighing the influence medicine exerts on literary form, genres, and interpretation. How might we better theorize the relationship between literature and medicine in the past century? Through weekly reading, discussion, and frequent writing, students will develop and apply interpretive skills to literary texts representing diverse experiences of illness and treatment.