First-Year Research Seminar: Pathos/Pathology: The Meaning of Illness in Literature and Film

Catalog description

This course examines illness and health as pertinent concepts to the history of literature and cinema. Conceptions of health and illness, as well as the personal experience of artists, have inspired revolutions in how we think about the nature of aesthetics. One of our major goals will be to contextualize the history of representation in media and contemporaneous understandings of the nature of illness and pathology. This course will ask questions such as: how have the representations of pain and disease altered a purely empirical understanding of illness? Does art serve a therapeutic purpose? How do fictional diseases, such as those in horror films or science fiction, make criticisms about society? We will look at plagues and pandemics, what Susan Sontag calls "Master Illnesses" like cancer and tuberculosis, the American AIDS epidemic, conceptions of "madness" in the West, and the ongoing struggle to interpret COVID 19. Our class will try to frame key moments in the history of literature and film in relation to contemporary conceptions of illness. Readings include Virginia Woolf's On Being Ill, Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor, Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals, Emily Martin's Flexible Bodies, Sarah Schulman's Let the Record Show, and Georges Canguilhem's The Normal and the Pathological. Screenings include The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The House is Black, The Fits, Cemetery of Splendor, Dawn of the Dead, and The Last of Us.