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Instructors: Jun.-Prof. Dr. Monika Class
Event type:
Seminar
Displayed in timetable as:
05.874.410
Hours per week:
2
Language of instruction:
Englisch
Min. | Max. participants:
- | 30
Registration group: BS/ELC 410
Priority scheme: Senatsrichtlinie
Requirements / organisational issues:
Illness narratives are written by patients or carers, they cover any length and manifest in themselves in prose, poetry and drama; while records of illness stretch across thousands of years and across the globe (Vickers "Illness Narratives" 388). Book-length accounts of illness have arguably emerged as a distinct publishing phenomenon in the Anglo-Saxon world in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The post-1950s specimen were mostly self-help books intended for readers who had recently been diagnosed with a similar condition. By the late 1970s, illness autobiographers like Norman Cousin in Anatomy of an Illness (1979) criticized the “dehumanising effects of modern healthcare” (Vickers "Illness Narratives" 388). By the early 1990s, illness gained importance in literary and philosophical memoirs, such as John Bayley's Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (1993), Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work (1995), and Hilary Mantel’s Giving up the Ghost (2003).
The course is designed to enable students to demonstrate (1) a detailed knowledge of some key illness narratives, (2) a good understanding of the effects of developments in the genre over the past 20 years or so, and (3) a broad familiarity with the critical literature that has arisen in response to the new genre.
Students are asked to purchase a copy and read over the summer at least one of the following three illness memoirs (autopathographies):
John Bayley's Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (1993), Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work (1995), and Hilary Mantel’s Giving up the Ghost (2003).
Students will need to buy their own copy of these three paperbacks.
Key secondary literature:
- Couser, G. Thomas. Recovering bodies : illness, disability, and life-writing. Madison ; London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.
- Frank, Arthur W. The wounded storyteller: body, illness and ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
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