Literature & Medicine (381-0-20)

Topic

Disability Lifeworlds

Instructors

Kalyan Nadiminti

Meeting Info

Harris Hall L28: Mon, Wed 11:00AM - 12:20PM

Overview of class

How does literature represent the social struggle of disability? This course examines how disability literatures mobilize not just identity categories, but, in fact, robust models of thought and feeling. We will read Anglophone writing from India, South Africa, Japan, 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. Panning back from textual representations, 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, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, we will think about the frictional registers of belonging and alienation represented in novels, autobiographies, novellas, and art. Texts include Ved Mehtq's Face to Face, Georgina Kleege's Sight Unseen, Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals, IM Coetzee's The Life and Times of Michael K, Eli Clare's Brilliant Imperfection, and Sauo Ichikawa's Hunchback.

Teaching Method

Discussion/seminar.

Evaluation Method

Assignments will comprise in-class presentations, a short close reading paper, and a final visual and tactile zine.

Class Materials (Required)

Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0143135203
J.M. Coetzee, The Life and Times of Michael K, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0140074482
Sauo Ichikawa, Hunchback, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0241700785

Class Attributes

Advanced Expression
Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline
SoC Humanities and Fine Arts Distro