Special Topics in Comparative Literature

The purpose of this course is to expand the repertoire of questions and analytical tools you bring to your reading, to sharpen your linguistic sensibilities, and to consider in what sense literature is an avenue for understanding cultural dimensions of medical practice, medical ethics, health and illness, and the body-mind relationship. We will be considering questions like the following: 

How does the practice of medicine reflect cultural mythologies, beliefs, habits of mind, manners, use of language?

What are some of the fundamental cultural assumptions about health, illness, healing, and death that have helped to shape American medicine?

How are healing and story-telling related in this culture and others?

How has medicine in this century been politicized and what impact has medical politics had on public attitudes toward specific illnesses and public policy regarding disease and treatment?

How are the politics of gender played out in the medical arena?

What drives people in pain or near death to seek creative modes of expression?  What are some of the problems in finding a language for pain?  What makes poems a particularly suitable vehicle for such efforts?

What difference does it make what metaphors we use when we speak of illness and healing?  What legitimacy is there in the idea of “illness as metaphor”?

How are “literary” conventions operative in clinical dialogue?  In case histories?  In scientific writing?  How do those conventions shape the information we give and receive about disease, illness, and pain?

What do our popular images and literary representations of doctors, nurses, and sick people reflect about the assumptions we make about illness?  About medical authority?  Privacy?  Personal rights?  The body-mind relation?

Texts for the Course:

Camus, Albert, The Plague 
Feldshuh, David, Miss Evers’ Boys
Kramer, The Normal Heart
McEntyre, Marilyn – Patient Poets
Moraga, Cherie, Heroes and Saints
Mukand, Jon, Ed. Vital Lines
Payer, Lynn.  Medicine and Culture
Reynolds and Stone, On Doctoring
Sacks, Oliver, The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat

A course reader that will include short stories, poems, critical essays, and excerpts of longer works.