Unit name | Literature and Medicine |
---|---|
Unit code | ENGL39011 |
Credit points | 20 |
Level of study | H/6 |
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 |
This unit will explore the interrelation between medicine and 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, medical practice and medical institutions in literary texts; nervous disorders and the novel of sensibility; Shakespeare and medicine; literary constructions of physical and mental illness; and illness as metaphor. Within this context, students will be encouraged to recognize the methodological difficulties of interdisciplinarity as well as its potential advantages.
Aims:
The unit aims to familiarise students with a range of literary texts, from different genres and historical period, that will be read in relation to medicine, in its various representations.
Students will have acquired knowledge of:
1 x 2-hour seminar per week.
Both summative elements will assess ILOs 1 - 4.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)
Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821)
John Keats, Poems and Letters
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)
George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872)
Samuel Beckett, Endgame (1957) and Happy Days (1961)
Thom Gunn, The Man with Night Sweats (1992) and Boss Cupid (2000)