This module is not currently running in 2024 to 2025.
This interdisciplinary module is designed to introduce students to major works of fiction which address medical issues, whether these are foregrounded or incidental. In the first seminar you will be introduced to the rising field of the Medical Humanities, the 'two cultures' debate, and the ‘illness as metaphor’ trope as theorised by Susan Sontag in Illness as Metaphor. In the second part of the module (taught by Dr Larry Duffy), you will explore the rise of clinical, observational medicine in nineteenth-century France, especially focusing on Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Zola’s La Bête humaine. In the third part (taught by Dr Patricia Novillo-Corvalan), you will examine a range of literary, medical, and scientific texts that dwell on the notions of memory, trauma, and forgetting. Primary texts include, Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, Jorge Luis Borges's 'Funes the Memorious', Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Ian McEwan’s Saturday, and selected science fiction tales written by the father of neuroscience: Spanish Nobel laureate Ramón y Cajal.
2 hours per week
Essay - 100%
Indicative reading list:
Sontag, S., Illness as Metaphor;
Flaubert, G., Madame Bovary;
Zola, E., La Bete Humaine;
Borges, J.L., Funes the Memorious;
Y Cajal, S.R., Vacation Stories;
Sacks, O., The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat;
Woolf, V., Mrs Dalloway;
McEwan, I., Saturday
See the library reading list for this module (Canterbury)
Students will be able to demonstrate familiarity with the substantial interaction between literary and medical discourses in nineteenth- twentieth- and twenty-first-century European, Latin American, and African literature;
Students will be able to demonstrate knowledge of the cultural, literary, scientific, and historical contexts in which medicine and literature have interacted;
Students will be able to critically assess the distinctive features of nineteenth- twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature that incorporates and articulates medical discourses from an interdisciplinary perspective;
Students will be able to examine the way in which writers have actively engaged with medical/scientific discourses in their depictions of illness in modern societies
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