Literature & Medicine (381-0-20)
Topic
Literature of Plague and Pandemic
Instructors
Kathryn Sydney Evans
Meeting Info
University Hall 218: Mon, Wed 11:00AM - 12:20PM
Overview of class
Some forays into fictional narratives are escapist; they allow us an imaginative respite from our daily reality. Other narrative adventures run in the opposite direction: through fiction, they allow us to engage with present difficulties with greater insight; acuity; context; and (perhaps most importantly) company, reminding us that we are not the first to face even seemingly unprecedented terrors. This course has been organized in the latter spirit, in hopes that engaging intellectually with literary and artistic responses to plagues and pandemics of the past will afford us new intellectual, historical, and effective resources for understanding our present and very recent past. We will look to literary narratives of plague and pandemic as a way to contextualize, historicize, and deepen our comprehension of the way the COVID-19 pandemic has changed our social, economic, cultural, and imaginative realities. Texts will span seven centuries of plague literature, including selections from Boccaccio's Decameron (1348-53) and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1380s); Thomas Dekker's The Wonderfull Yeare (1603); Daniel DeFoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (1722); Edgar Allan Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" (1842); Jack London's The Scarlet Plague (1912); José Sarmago's Blindness (1997); Colson Whitehead's Zone One (2011); Ling Ma's Severance (2017); and Carmen Maria Machado's "Inventory" (2018).
Teaching Method
Seminar discussion, brief introductory lectures (usually on Canvas prior to class), group discussion and peer review.
Evaluation Method
Participation (online and in class); online annotation using Hypothes.is; podcast assignment; final paper or project; peer evaluation and self evaluation.
Class Materials (Required)
Eula Biss. (2015). On Immunity: An Inoculation. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press. ISBN: 1555977200
Susan Sontag. (2001). Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York, NY: Picador. ISBN: 0312420137
Daniel Defoe. ed. Paula R. Backsheider. (1992). A Journal of the Plague Year. New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company. ISBN: 0393961885
Colson Whitehead. (2011). Zone One. New York, NY : Anchor Books. ISBN: 0307455173
Jose Saramago. (1997). Blindness, trans Giovanni Pontiero. Boston, MA and New York, NY: Mariner Books. ISBN: 0156007754
Ling Ma, (2018). Severance. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN: 1250214998
Additional required readings and media will be posted on Canvas. Students are welcome to use alternate editions.
Texts will be available at: Norris bookstore.
Class Attributes
Advanced Expression
Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline
Literature & Fine Arts Distro Area