Introductory description

This module will introduce you to the rich creative and critical work in medical humanities and disability arts, thinking about what literature, lifewriting, film and graphic fiction might offer to the understanding and critique of the practice of medicine and conceptions of illness and disability. The module spans the twentieth and twenty-first century, investigating medical humanities writing from as early as 1926 and as late as 2022, but it concentrates its attention on the last twenty years, introducing recent work and theory in relation to physical disability, chronic illness and severe mental health conditions. It also encourages you to think not only about the psychological, phenomenological and social dimensions of illness and disability, but also the new forms of creativity, art and narrative that such experiences have produced. In the wake of Covid-19, issues such as chronic illness and mental health have gained new complexity and greater prominence in the social and cultural landscapes. You will explore new writing and answer questions about how language and form can hope to represent such subjective and non-normative experiences as pain and psychosis, as well as thinking about how to create narrative about experiences that frustrate traditional linear story-telling, such as chronic illness, or terminal illness. You will learn new theoretical and critical skills useful on other modules, as well as participating in research-led teaching at the forefront of a rapidly developing field.

Module web page

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Unit 1: Illness as Metaphor/Illness as Narrative
In this introductory unit, we will look at some of the key foundational texts of medical humanities and the cultural history of illness, and apply the ideas and conceptual frameworks they provide in close reading some relevant poetry in Week 1, and the first primary works, Hilary Mantel’s Giving Up the Ghost, and a section of Anne Boyer’s The Undying in Week 2. Participants will be introduced to issues in narrative medicine, and debates (formal and cultural) about illness, the body and metaphor.

Week 1: Backstories
Virginia Woolf, ‘On Being Ill' (1926) [short essay]

From:
Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (1978)
Arthur Frank, The Wounded Storyteller (1995)
Anne Hunsaker Hawkins, Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography (1998)

Close ‘sight reading’ of poems in the light of the ideas in these excerpted works.

Week 2: The Big C
From:
Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals (1980) [memoir]
Anne Boyer, The Undying: A Meditation on Modern Illness (2019) [memoir]

Unit 2: Chronic Narratives
In this unit, we will look at the lifewriting of chronic illness, a growing segment of the ‘medical memoir’ genre, and consider the challenges chronic conditions pose to narrativisation and literary form (building on and extending the theoretical base of Unit 1). We will think about the formal features of autobiography and memoir, namely Hilary Mantel’s Giving Up the Ghost and Sarah Manguso’s The Two Kinds of Decay, and the possibilities for representing new experiences of time, space, the body and subjectivity offered by science fiction (Etter) and graphic fiction (Brunton). We will—incidentally but relevantly—also consider the cultural concepts of ‘crisis’ and ‘chronic time’, and current theorizations of and debates about ‘care’, in relation to illness, healthcare provision, pandemic culture and late capitalist society in general.

Week 3
From: Hilary Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost (2003) [autofiction/ memoir]
Sarah Manguso, The Two Kinds of Decay (2008) [memoir]

G. Thomas Couser, 'Autopathography: Women, Illness, and Lifewriting', a/b: Auto/biography Studies, vol. 6 (1991): 65-75
Kathlyn Conway, Beyond Words: Illness and the Limits of Expression (2007)

Week 4
Sarah Rose Etter, The Book of X [sci fi/ YA novel] (2019)
Tessa Brunton, Notes from a Sickbed [graphic novel] (2022)

Meghan O'Rourke, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness (2022)

Unit 3: Disability, Performance, Identity
This unit will introduce key disability concepts and theories, looking at some foundational work by Tobin Siebers (social model, passing, masquerade, disability and democracy) and Rosemarie Garland Thomson (feminist disability studies, embodiment, the ‘stare’), as well as some recent intersectional disability theory (Clare) and writing. It re-reads Beckett’s canonical play Endgame through a disability lens and in relation to a recent production by actors with Parkinson’s disease, as well as Siebers and Thomson’s theoretical ideas, drawing out ideas of performativity and spectatorship in relation to disability, before turning to some contemporary essays, lifewriting and poetry exploring interesectional experiences of disability and their social and personal construction.

Week 5
Samuel Beckett, Endgame (1954) [play] / The Endgame Project, Me to Play [documentary] (2021)

From: Ato Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (Columbia UP, 2007)
Matt Hargrave, Theatres of Learning Disability: Good, Bad or Plain Ugly? (Springer, 2016)

Selected Disability Theory reading: Tobin Siebers, ‘Disability in Theory’, American Literary History, 2001; Rosemary Garland Thomson, ‘Staring at the Other’, Disability Studies Quarterly, 2005

Week 7
Raymond Antrobus, The Perseverance (2018) [poetry]
From: Terry Galloway, Mean Little Deaf Queer (2009) [memoir]
Keah Brown, The Pretty One: On Life, Pop Culture, Disability and Other Reasons to Fall in Love with Me (2019) [essays]

Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999)

Unit 4: The Land of Enlightenment: Psychosis and Delusion
The final unit will think about the experience of severe mental illness and disordered thinking, examining the challenges to representation these conditions offer, but also the possibilities of literary and creative writing in this regard. It will revisit conceptions of narrative and metaphor from Unit 1 in relation to this new context. It will consider theoretical and phlosophical cruxes (Woods’ sublimity, Jaspers’ explaining vs understanding, Deleuze’s schizoanalysis, Fuchs’ phenomenology of time) in relation to schizophrenia and delusion. It will also look at the representation of psychotic experience in literature and film and consider the formal, aesthetic and cultural significance of key works in this respect, touching finally on their uses in medical education.

Week 8
Marguerite Sechehaye, Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl [clinical memoir] (1951)
Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias (2019) [essays]

Angela Woods, The Sublime Object of Psychiatry: Schizophrenia in Clinical and Cultural Theory (OUP, 2011)
Matthew Broome, 'The Neuroscience, Psychopathology, and Philosophy of Time', Philosophy, Psychiatry, Psychology, vol. 12, no. 3 (2005): 187-194

Week 9
From Janet Frame, An Angel at My Table (1984) [memoir]
Jane Campion (dir.), An Angel at My Table (1990) [film]
Lodge H. Kerrigan (dir.), Clean, Shaven (1993) [short film]

Sue Gillett, Angel from the Mirror City: Jane Campion’s Janet Frame, Senses of Cinema, vol. 10 (2000) [online]
Stephen Harper, 'The Suffering Screen: Cinematic Portrayals of Mental Distress', Madness, Power and the Media (Springer, 2009): 59-102

Conclusions
Week 10
Roundup: student-curated case studies and reflections

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• To gain knowledge of a range of fictions, lifewriting and critical writing representing disability and illness.
• To understand the form of different genres and modes of writing and visual culture (novel, lifewriting, graphic novel, essay, film) in representing the experience and social meanings of disability.
• To understand and apply literary theoretical concepts and methods (narratology, stylistics, cultural theory)
• To understand, explain and apply concepts from psychiatry, psychology and critical medical humanities.
• To understand and apply different theoretical models of disability, including functionalist theory, the social model of disability (including social oppression theory), disability ‘gain’.
• To gain an overview of critical disability studies and its intersection with literary studies.
• To learn literary research skills (close reading, anthologizing, critical bibliography, summary).
• To formulate original arguments to do with an aspect of the module based on independent research (to be demonstrated through an essay)

Indicative reading list

Aronson, Louise. (2014). A history of the present illness: Stories. Bloomsbury.
Broome, Matthew R. et al. (2012) The Maudsley Reader in Phenomenological Psychiatry. Cambridge University Press.
Bülow, P. H. (2003) ‘In dialogue with time: identity and illness in narratives about chronic fatigue’, Narrative Enquiry.
Bury, Mike. (2001) ‘Illness narratives: fact or fiction?’, Sociology of Health and Illness, vol. 23, no. 3.
Charon, Rita. (2008). Narrative medicine. Oxford University Press.
Cole, Thomas R. (2014) Medical Humanities. Oxford University Press.
Connor, David et al (2016) DisCrit: Disability studies and critical race theory in education. Teachers College Press.
Couser G. T. (2011). ‘What disability studies has to offer medical education.’ The Journal of Medical Humanities, 32(1), 21–30. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-010-9125-1
Devlin, Richard Francis and Dianne Pothier. (2006) Critical Disability Theory. UBC Press.
Frank, Arthur W. (2002) At the Will of the Body: Reflections on Illness. Mariner Press.
Frank, Arthur W. (2013) The wounded storyteller: Body, illness, and ethics. The University of Chicago Press.
Jones, Therese et al. (2014) Health Humanities Reader. Rutgers University Press.
Leveen, L. (2016, May 25) The hidden dying of doctors: What the humanities can teach medicine, and why we all need medicine to learn it. Los Angeles Review of Books. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-hidden-dying-of-doctors-what-the-humanities-can-teach-medicine-and-why-we-all-need-medicine-to-learn-it/
Markotic, Nicola. (2003) ‘Re/Presenting Disability and Illness: Foucault and two 20th Century Fictions’, Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 23, no. 2.
Mukherjee, Siddhartha. (2010) The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. Scribner.
Sontag, Susan. (2009) Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. Penguin.
Salisbury, Laura and Andrew Shail. (2010) Neurology and Modernity: A Cultural History of Nervous Systems. Palgrave.
Sass, Louis. (1994) Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature and Thought. Harvard UP.
Scrofano, Diane. (2019). ‘Disability narrative theory and young adult fiction of mental illness’, Journal of Research on Libraries and Young People,
Siebers, Tobin. (2008) Disability Theory. University of Michigan Press.
Simpson, Hannah. (2021) ‘Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance’, Journal of Beckett Studies, vol. 30, no. 1.
Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. (1996) Extraordinary Bodies Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. Columbia University Press..
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie (2009). Staring: How We Look. Oxford University Press.
Whitehead, Anne et al. (2016) The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities. Edinburgh University Press.
Williams, Gareth. (1984) ‘The genesis of chronic illness: narrative re-construction’, Sociology of Health and Illness, vol. 6, no. 2.
Wohlmann, Anita and Madaline Harrison. (2019) ‘To Be Continued: Serial Narration, Chronic Disease and Disability’, Literature and Medicine, vol. 37, no. 1.
Wood, Mary Elene. (2013) Lifewriting and Schizophrenia: Encounters at the Edge of Meaning. Rodopi.

Research element

The assessment is a 3000 word research essay which will require students to undertake independent research and 4 x 200 word entries in a critical bibliography as part of a proposal for a disability and illness literary ‘reader’ (Sick Imagination). For the essay they will respond to a set of options or may formulate an original research question based on any aspect of the material they have studied. They must draw on primary texts and theoretical literature from one of the fields covered, to demonstrate their understanding of the key concepts and contexts covered by the module.

Interdisciplinary

This module is situated within an interdisciplinary area of research. It employs the methods of literary and critical medical humanities, principally drawing on the concerns of literary criticism and literary theory, but in conjunction with critical and sociological theory (including disability theory, social constructionism, medical anthropology), philosophy (phenomenology, philosophy of psychiatry), and medical and psychological science. It will also investigate and interrogate the meanings and methods of ‘narrative medicine’ in its clinical and cultural guises. The module will introduce students to scholarship produced in all of these contexts, and ask them to think carefully about the ideas and assumptions underpinning different disciplinary approaches.

International

This module principally draws on Anglophone literature from Britain, Europe and North America, but includes in its key primary and set secondary texts writing from Black British, African-American and Asian-American writers who reflect and draw creatively on their heritage and identity beyond the Global North, and consider its intersection with their lived experience of disability or illness.

Subject specific skills

Close reading; analysis of genre, form, and style; narratology for literary studies and narrative medicine; capacity to understand, and employ different theoretical and critical approaches; interdisciplinary knowledge and methods.

Transferable skills

Comparative and close analysis, research, and the formulation of original and informed arguments.