Literature & Medicine (381-0-20)
Topic
Literature of Plague and Pandemic
Instructors
Kathryn Sydney Evans
Meeting Info
Parkes Hall 214: Tues, Thurs 3:30PM - 4:50PM
Overview of class
The World Health Organization declared the end of the COVID-19 pandemic on May 11, 2023—three years and change after it began. Most of us continue to experience the aftermath of the pandemic in various ways.* Primary and secondary school students continue to lag behind grade level by as much as nine months; commercial zones in major urban areas remain empty as remote working arrangements persist; millions of families grieve for lives lost to the novel coronavirus; and millions more contend with the effects of long COVID. In short, even as the epidemiological threat of the SARS-COV-2 virus has waned, the sociocultural impact of this worldwide crisis has just begun to come into focus. Having spent three years in involuntary training as amateur epidemiologists, we can now turn to the humanistic disciplines—which analyze the processes and products of human culture—to take stock of what this experience has meant for our values, our outlook, our relationships, and our culture. In that spirit, this course will investigate plague literature over the longue durée—nearly seven centuries, from 1348 C.E.-2023 C.E.—to explore the diversity of human experience in relation to plague and pestilence as represented in the Western/Anglophone canon.** Guiding questions will include: how have different groups of people searched for answers about the mechanisms and the meanings of plague (in medicine, in religion, in moral philosophy)? how have cultures responded to death rates so high that they defy traditional rituals of mourning and memorialization? what underlying prejudices, suspicions, and other social ills tend to be activated by pandemics, and to what effect? what role does literature play in helping us to formulate, and sometimes to answer, these questions and others?
Course readings are divided into three units: medieval and early modern Europe, from Boccaccio to Daniel Dafoe; literature of the U.S. AIDS epidemic, including Tony Kushner and Sapphire; and a final unit on contemporary literature, featuring presentiments of and responses to COVID-19 from Ling Ma, Carmen María Machado, and Michael Cunningham. Assignments will include collective annotations on Canvas, podcast episodes (produced in small groups), Canvas Discussions, and a final essay or creative project.
*As well as other crises—political, financial, moral, ethical, educational, racial, economic, and so on—but there are only ten weeks in the quarter.
**The primary sources for this course were almost all composed in English; those originally composed in another language have been translated so widely as to occupy space in the Anglophone canon despite their origins in another linguistic tradition.
Class Materials (Required)
Eula Biss. On Immunity: An Inoculation. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2015. ISBN 1555977200
Daniel Defoe. ed. Paula R. Backsheider. A Journal of the Plague Year. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. ISBN 0393961885
Tony Kushner, Angels in America: Revised and Complete Edition. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2013. ISBN 9781559363846
Ling Ma, Severance. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019. ISBN 1250214998
Michael Cunningham, Day. New York: Random House, 2023. ISBN 0399591346
Other readings and media will be available on Canvas.
Class Attributes
Advanced Expression
Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline
Literature & Fine Arts Distro Area