Reading & Composition

What does life look like in “plague-time”?  What does it mean for a body, a place, a community to be “clean” or “unclean”? What can we learn from fictional and historical sites of contamination? This course will explore the concept of contagion and the fears, real and imagined, that surround it. We will examine the transmission and containment of “infected” or “infectious” ideas and bodies in order to compare the ways that humans respond to crisis, from the level of the
individual to the global. Drawing our case studies from literature, film, and television, we will consider the shapeshifting terror of contagion from zombie films to ancient hereditary curses, from the Black Death to the AIDS epidemic, from viral videos to the Chernobyl disaster to our  own precarious position in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Readings & films will include, among others:  

 Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus
 Lucretius, De Rerum Natura
 Boccaccio, Decameron
 Rosemary Horrox, The Black Death
 Ingmar Bergman, “The Seventh Seal”
 Ben Jonson, The Alchemist
 Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year
 Edgar Allan Poe, “Masque of the Red Death”
 Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, “Quadraturin”
 Virginia Woolf, “On Being Ill”
 Forough Farrokhzad,“The House is Black”
 Susan Sontag, AIDS and its Metaphors
 Thomas Bernhard, Gargoyles
 Roger Spottiswoode, “And the Band Played On”
 Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant
 Netflix web TV series “Black Summer”
 Jonathan Levine, “Warm Bodies”
 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “Apollo”