Literature & Medicine (381-0-20)

Topic

Disability Lifeworlds

Instructors

Kalyan Nadiminti

Meeting Info

Kresge Centennial Hall 2-319: Tues, Thurs 9:30AM - 10:50AM

Overview of class

How does literature work through the structural and social struggle of disability to create discrete, sustainable worlds? How night the language of disability mobilize not just an identity category but a robust aesthetic apparatus of thought and feeling? This course works through Anglophone writing from India, South Africa, Britain, and the US to ask how disability remaps collectivity care, and personhood by querying vocabularies of cripness, capacity, debility, and illness. We will examine how disability challenge assumed categories of exceptionality and capitalist productivity, while also asking significant questions about civil rights and human rights. In addition, the course also tracks how disability studies has evolved beyond a narrow Anglo-American focus to understand complex Global South realities. Reading disability theorists like Rosemarie Garland Thompson, Eve Sedgwick, Jasbir Puar, and Eli Clare, we will think about the frictional registers of belonging and alienation represented in novels, autobiographies, short stories, and art.

Teaching Method

Assignments will comprise presentations, weekly discussion posts, and a final group video project.

Class Materials (Required)

Ved Mehtq's Face to Face, Anita Desai's Fasting, Feasting, Georgina Kleege's Blind Rage, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, IM Coetzee's Slow Man, and Indra Sinha's Animal's People.

Class Attributes

Advanced Expression
Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline
Literature & Fine Arts Distro Area

Enrollment Requirements

Enrollment Requirements: Pre-registration -- Reserved for English students.