ENGL 219

Fall 2022 All Classes

All Classes

Literature and Medicine

SHOW FINAL EXAM SCHEDULE

Credit: 3 hours.

Introduction to the interchange between the medical and literary imaginations – how diseases, bodies, and minds get written about and represented culturally. The premise of the course is that ideas and experiences concerning our health are always mediated through the literature we read, the films we watch, and the stories we tell our doctors and that they tell us. Our focus will be on how literature and film have played and continue to play a crucial role in understanding health on local, national, and global scales.

This course satisfies the General Education Criteria in Fall 2022 for:

Humanities – Lit & Arts

My Favorites

My Schedule

Section Status updates every 10 minutes.

ENGL 219 class schedule data for fall 2022
	CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
	71513	Lecture-Discussion	P	11:00AM -12:15PM	TR	English Building	Gaedtke, A	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/22/22-12/07/22 Degree Notes: Humanities - Lit & Arts course. Credit: 3 hours Section Info: FA22 ENGL 219 Andrew Gaedtke Literature and Medicine This course will explore the ways that literature represents experiences of illness, health, and medicine. We will take up questions at the forefront of “medical humanities”—a field that examines cultural attitudes toward illness and recovery, the dramas and power dynamics of the clinic, and lived experiences of both doctors and patients. We will think through the ways that our experiences of health and illness are not simply given or universal but are shaped by the novels and memoirs we read, the images we encounter, and the stories we tell our doctors and that they tell us. In our discussions we will ask what kinds of narratives, character types, and assumptions about health and illness can be discerned from medical narratives and how these may have changed over time. Are there alternative attitudes toward experiences of embodiment that we might be able to recognize in new or forgotten representations of health and illness? In what ways have assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, and “the human” been constructed through ideas about health, illness, and abnormality? How can health care professionals’ delivery of care be improved through forms of literary training and knowledge? The course is open to all and may be of special interest to students who are considering a future in health care. We will discuss fiction, plays, essays, and films by Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Siri Hustvedt, Ian McEwan, Susan Sontag, Elaine Scarry, Arthur Frank, Rita Charon, and others.