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Literature and Medicine
Unit information: Literature and Medicine in 2014/15
Please note: you are viewing unit and programme information
for a past academic year. Please see the current academic year for up to date information.
| Unit name |
Literature and Medicine |
| Unit code |
ENGLM3022 |
| Credit points |
20 |
| Level of study |
M/7
|
| Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24)
|
| Unit director |
Dr. Lee |
| Open unit status |
Not open |
| Pre-requisites |
None
|
| Co-requisites |
None
|
| School/department |
Department of English |
| Faculty |
Faculty of Arts |
Description including Unit Aims
This unit will explore the interrelation between medicine in literature across a range of literary genres and historical periods. Topics will include: representations of the body in literature; the complex interaction of literature and psychoanalysis; illness and the nature of artistic experience; the representation of doctors in literary texts; nervous disorders and the novel of sensibility; Shakespeare and medicine; literary constructions of physical and mental illness; and illness as metaphor.
Intended Learning Outcomes
- Be familiar with a wide range of literary texts that engage with medicine.
- Understand several critical approaches that have characterised recent scholarly discussion in the interdisciplinary field of literature and medicine.
- Be able to construct a reasoned argument supported by appropriate use of evidence and analysis.
- To understand some of the ways in which illness has been imagined, represented, and theorized in both literary texts and criticism.
- to understanding of how of ideas about physical and mental illness develop and change over different historical periods.
Teaching Information
10 x 2-hour seminar, 1 reading week, 11 Consultation Hours
Assessment Information
1 essay of 4,000 words. Each student will also be required to give a 1000 word presentation in class
Reading and References
- Howard Brody, Stories of Sickness (rev. 2003)
- Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (rev. 1990)
- Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830-1980 (1985)
- Cheryl Mattingly, Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: The Narrative Structure of * Experience (2003)
- Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill (1940)
- George Eliot, Middlemarch
