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.
William Shakespeare, 1 Henry 4
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)
John Keats, Poems and Letters
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)
Samuel Beckett, Not I and Happy Days
Thom Gunn, The Man with Night Sweats and Boss Cupid