Both literature and medicine focus on ideas about and perceptions of the human being, and stories about diseases and their treatments as well as about patients and doctors have been a staple in US-American fiction since its beginnings. While 19th-century texts often reflect on the aspects of human mortality and the social and ethical dimensions of sickness, 21st-century TV shows respond to and criticize the political and economic aspects of scientific medicine and its appropriation of the body. Today, medical schools throughout the US include literary writings in their curricula, while literary scholars and writers explore the narrative nature and potential of medical texts.
In our course, we will examine the role of early US literature in the cultural construction of illnesses (such as consumption/tuberculosis) and their meaning, and we will discuss more recent examples that comment on the societal impact of the advancements in scientific medicine. We will also look into the increasingly popular interdisciplinary field of Literature and Science, with a focus on Literature and Medicine (John Cartwright, Rita Charon), and its relevance and productivity for American Studies by considering concepts like bioethics, medicalization, embodiment, and medical humanities.
As the major part of our seminar consists of reading/watching and analyzing texts – novels, short stories, movies – that explore medical themes and motifs, we will try to answer the following questions: How does medical fiction engage with issues of agency, power relations, bodily autonomy, class, or gender? How is the intersection of medicine with political ideologies (as in public health) explored, and what are the implications of politicized medicine and science? How is “the doctor” portrayed? And last but not least: Why do we always find the ‘mad doctor’ but rarely the mad literary scholar? Ideally, we will come to understand how medical fictions – along with scientific studies and popular-scientific writings – can both shape and generate our thinking about scientific and medical issues within larger political and ideological contexts.
- Trainer/in: Katja Schmieder