Tema våren 2022

In this course, we will explore how sates of mental and physical illness are represented in narrative. We will read across a wide range of genres and text types, covering poetry, prose, and drama from Shakespeare to the twenty-first century, and think about specific affordances and limitations of fiction and non-fiction, essay, short story, case study, novel, poem, and performance. We will encounter perspectives of doctors, caregivers, and patients, and discuss potential uses of literary narratives in medicine. We will address questions about the limits of what is representable and analyze strategies literary texts can make use of to allow readers access to a given experience, or to foreground the difficulties in understanding the physical and mental states of others. Finally, we will reflect on norms around the concepts of illness and health, wholeness and fracture or impairment, and explore how literary and medical narratives express but also potentially challenge such norms.