Humanities and Fine Arts 191HFA56 - FYS- Sick Lit

This course explores the complex relationships between sickness and literature. We will conduct a wide-angle survey of writings about disease, considering both how outbreaks shaped literary history and how literature shaped cultural understandings of disease. Furthermore, we ask: how has the cultural meaning of "contagion" been refracted through discourses around race, gender, sexuality, and nationalism? The focus of the class will be wide-ranging, and some of the concerns of the class will include: the pathological metaphors used to describe literature (such as Aristotle's catharsis or Artaud's "Theater of Cruelty"); literary representations of plague; historical definitions of "health" or "capacity"; the rise of systematic governmental responses to disease; and the lessons that might be learned from a forensics of contagion.

Open to first-year Humanities and Fine Arts Exploratory Track students and first-year HFA Majors.