Writing and the Representation of Pain

3 units

Writing intensive course on the representation of pain at every level, from private suffering to public policy. Course reader consists of examples of or extracts from a diversity of materials: the Bible and Ovid, medieval religious lyric, saints' lives, visions of hell and damnation, descriptions of visionary illness, Freud's Anna O, Kafka's In the Penal Colony, Wilde's The Nightingale and the Rose, Woolf's On Being Ill, Artaud and the theater of cruelty; autobiographical and other writings by Susan Sontag and Inga Clendinnen; theory by Bataille, Deleuze, Dollimore, and Elizabeth Grosz; work on pain by Leder, Morris, Rey and others; poetry by Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Gwen Harwood, Alan Jenkins and others. We will also read Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain and two recent novels: Andrew Miller's Ingenious Pain and Manil Suri's The Death of Vishnu.