First-Year Writing Seminar: Illness, Healing, and Narrative

Catalog description

In narrative medicine, an established but still new field, the patient’s individual history, and the stories they tell about themselves, are considered to be as important as their physical symptoms or medical diagnosis. Drawing on narrative medicine and related fields, and focusing largely on work that has emerged from a US context, this class thinks about the intersections between illness, healing, and storytelling. We begin with an introduction to narrative medicine and histories of the relationship between body and mind. We then draw on this work as we turn to fiction and nonfiction narratives of illness, which may include writing by Audre Lorde, Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony. Our study of these texts will be enriched through readings about race and medicine and North American Indigenous medicine. The course’s assignments aim to help students develop a productive writing practice through short exercises as well as drafts and revisions of three formal papers.