Course Syllabus
Narrative Medicine: Illness, Suffering, and Madness in Literature |
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Course Description
How can stories help us understand illnesses? In this course, we will engage with a series of questions that elucidate the power of storytelling within the discourses of health and disease. Combining close readings of various types of fiction (novels, films, short stories, media, poems) with hands-on meetings with doctors, authors, curators, and researchers, we will explore narrative medicine as part of the new interdisciplinary field Health/Medical Humanities. You will gain insight into how literature can help us comprehend experiences of suffering and illness, approach the bio-ethical implications of treatment and understand the complex relationship between patient and practitioner.
Narrative Medicine integrates disciplinary objectives from the sciences and the arts and is designed for both the student going into health care and the literature student interested in illness motifs and themes related to body and identity; misfitting and disability.
Together, we will wonder about the connection between narrative and illness and attempt to answer questions such as: What is narrative and how does it relate to us humans? How does narrative shape our understanding of disease and treatment, normality and disability as well as our culture's attitude towards these issues? What role can narrative play in both the physician’s training as well as in the patient’s attempt to find meaning or coherence when faced with illness?
Learning Objectives
By the end of this course you will be able to:
- Understand how literature can help us comprehend and recognize illnesses and suffering
- Account for the basic elements of narrative and apply literary methodology to accounts of illness
- Discuss the bioethical implications related to dealing with body, illness, death etc.
- Appreciate the complexities of the medical encounter and identify intersubjective issues in the relation between the sick and healthy, the patient and the health care professional
Approach to Teaching
In combination with close reading of illness narratives, this course will include a great number of encounters with doctors, authors, curators etc. to give you a holistic understanding of the pathological body. Furthermore, we will include visual material, i.e. TV-shows, visual arts, film.
Close reading and deep analysis will be the core method of the course. How a story gets told is as important as what gets told - especially when it comes to illness narratives - so we need to pay attention to both content and form.
The class revolves around discussions and utilizes diverse approaches to involve students in both small and large group conversations. Additionally, each student, grouped in 4-5, is required to take charge of leading a class discussion on a selected text once during the semester. Sign up will be available in the first week of classes.
Course expectations and Requirements
It is a participation-discussion oriented course and requires your active participation and engagement. Students are expected to come to class having done all assignments, fully prepared to engage in discussions and activities (i.e. with questions and points for discussion).
If you are shy about speaking up in class, you are welcome to email me your questions or ideas for class discussions before class start.
The course emphasizes reflection and analysis and aim to “complicate” matters more so than "solving" them by attempting to get behind the biomedical framework and discuss issues relating to illness, health, bodies etc. in a different (philosophical, affective, social-justice oriented etc.) perspective. As such, your personal process is important and I will ask you to keep track of that by journaling your thoughts a long the way.
Faculty
Birgitte Duelund Pallesen, Cand.mag. in Comparative Literature, University of Copenhagen 2013. BA studies in European Literature, Film and Philosophy, UCL, London, UK. Litteraturnu.dk (2009-2017), Gyldendal (2009-14), editor. With DIS since 2015. Also teaching Postcolonial Europe: Narratives, Nationalism, and Race, Sense of Place in European Literature, and Hans Christian Andersen.
Readings
The following titles are examples of readings, not a complete list. Readings include (excerpts from):
- Aldous Huxley Brave New World
- Anne Boyer The Undying - a meditation on modern illness
- Audre Lorde Cancer Journals
- Arthur Frank The Wounded Storyteller
- Louis Borges On Blindness
- Bulgakov A Country Doctor’s Notebook
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman The Yellow Wallpaper
- Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick Touching Feeling
- Fine Gråbøl What Kingdom
- Fyodor Dostoevsky Notes from the Underground
- Galen The Best Physician Is also a Philosopher
- J.M. Coetzee Slow Man
- Jones, Wear, Friedman et al. The Health Humanities Reader
- Kazuo Ishiguro Never Let Me Go
- Lauren Berlant "Risky Bigness"
- Leo Tolstoy The Death of Ivan Ilych
- Leslie Jamison The Empathy Exams
- Margaret Atwood Handmaid's Tale
- Margaret Edson Wit
- Maria Gerhard Transfer Window
- Mark Harrison Disease and the Modern World
- Mary Lindemann Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe
- Mary Shelley Frankenstein
- Paul Crawford Routledge Companion to Health Humanities
- Paul Ricoeur Oneself as Another
- Rita Charon Narrative Medicine - honoring stories of illness
- Rita Charon The Principles and Practice if Narrative Medicine
- Samuel Beckett Waiting for Godot
- Shoshana Felman Writing and Madness
- Susan Sontag Illness as Metaphor
- Sylvia Plath Bell Jar
- Thomas Mann The Magic Mountain & Tristan
- Tove Ditlevsen The Faces
- Ursula K. le Guin Left Hand of Darkness
- Virginia Woolf On Being Ill
- William Carlos Williams The Doctor Stories
Academic Regulations
Please make sure to read the Academic Regulations on the DIS website. There you will find regulations on:
DIS - Study Abroad in Scandinavia - www.DISabroad.org
Course Summary:
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