Selected Topics in Anglophone Literature: Literature and Suicide

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Strictly speaking, no one can testify to the physical and psychological experience of suicide—perhaps this is what has made the subject so prone to literary expression. This course will begin in the Middle Kingdom of Egypt, where an anonymous author wrote the first known suicide text: “Dispute between a man and his Ba.” We will then consider Hindu, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic texts on suicide before looking at four major revolutions in the modern understanding of voluntary death: the invention of “suicide,” a sympathetic and progressive word coined by Sir Thomas Browne in 1643; the Romantic obsession with self-destruction; the modernist challenge to religious and Romantic approaches to suicide; and finally the reassessment of suicide in a clinical context and the subsequent phenomenon of “suicide memoirs.” Authors include Sophocles, Shakespeare, Goethe, Mishima, Chopin, Woolf, Larsen, Soyinka, Plath, Sarah Kane, and Kay Redfield Jamison.