This course is the fifth iteration of a course that’s been running since 2008. At its
heart is the question of what is at stake in contemporary writing about illness. What
does the experience of sickness today tell us about contemporary society? How
much of our selfhood is invested in our physical relationship with the world? To
what extent are our bodies involved in our relating to others and in others relating
to us? What sorts of generalisations – if any – can be made about the experience of
illness from contemporary life writing? Are there any aspects of illness that fiction is
better placed to capture than memoir? These are the sorts of questions with which
we shall be concerned on this course.
The course will fall into two halves. The first five seminars will be spent exploring
some of the major theoretical approaches taken in the field (narrative
reconstruction, phenomenology, disability studies, psychoanalysis, Sontagian
‘surface reading’). The second five will consider major recent illness memoirs in the
light of these theories. Students taking this course will require an unusual degree of
tenacity and ambition – the readings are plentiful and demanding (and occasionally
distressing). You will need to be able to keep an exceptionally diverse range of
opinions in mind in connection with the texts under review and to be willing to put
them together in your own way, creatively.
Seminar programme
Week 1 Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor; David Rieff, Swimming in a Sea of Death: A
Son's Memoir
Week 2 Narrative medicine: Anne Hunsaker Hawkins, Reconstructing Illness: Studies
in Pathography, Arthur Frank, The Wounded Storyteller; Paul Atkinson, Narrative
Turn or Blind Alley (http://qhr.sagepub.com/content/7/3/325.full.pdf)
Week 3 Phenomenology: Havi Carel, On Illness. Drew Leder, The Absent Body (1990),
S. Kay Toombs, The Meaning of Illness. M. Merleau-Ponty, ‘The Child’s Relation to
the World’.
Week 4 Disability Studies: Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy (1995)
Week 5 Psychoanalysis: Psychoanalytic psychosomatics. Selection of papers to
include: Marilia Aisenstein, Psychosomatic Solution or Somatic Outcome: The Man
from Burma’ International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 74:371-381; Catalina
Bronstein, ‘Psychosomatics: The Search for Meaning’ International Journal of
Psycho-Analysis, Volume 92, Issue 1, February 2011 Pages 173–195; Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid reading and reparative reading; or, you’re so paranoid you
probably think this introduction is about you’.
Week 6 Hilary Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost (2003)
Week 7 Gillian Rose, Love’s Work (1995)
Week 8, John M Hull, On Sight and Insight (
Week 9 Marion Coutts, The Iceberg (2014); Tom Lubbock, Until Further Notice I am
Alive (2012)
Week 10, Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face (1994)
Select Bibliography Further Secondary Reading
Adorno, Theodor W. "The Liquidation of the Self." In Can One Live after Auschwitz?:
A Philosophical Reader, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, 427–36. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2003.
Anderson, Linda Autobiogaphy (London: Routledge, 2001) Backscheider, Paula R.
Reflections on Biography (Oxford: OUP, 1999)
Barthes, Roland, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen
Heath London: Fontana, 1977
Batchelor, John, ed., The Art of Literary Biography (Oxford, 1995)
Becker, Gay. Disrupted Lives: How People Create Meaning in a Chaotic World.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Birkerts, Sven ‘Biography and the Dissolving Self’, in Readings St Paul: Minnesota:
Graywolf Press, 1999
Brooke-Rose, Christine. Life, End of. Manchester: Carcanet, 2006.
Butler, Sandra and Barbara Rosenblum. Cancer in Two Voices. San Francisco:
Spinsters Book Company, 1991.
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
Cassell EJ. The Nature of Suffering. 2nd ed [revised with 3 new chapters]. Oxford, UK:
Oxford University Press; 2003.
Cassell EJ.The Healer's Art: A New Perspective on the Doctor-Patient Relationship.
New York, NY: Lippincott; 1976. (Current Edition: Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press;
1985)
Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of
Literature. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975.
de Man, Paul, ‘Autobiography as De-Facement’, in The Rhetoric of Romanticism
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1984)
Diedrich, Lisa, Treatments (U of Minnesota P, 2011)
Frank,A rthur,The W ounded
Storyteller (U of Chicago P, 1995) Frank, Arthur, ‘Thinking with Stories’ in Literature
and Medicine 2006
Frank, Arthur, "The Force of Embodiment: Bodies, Dispositions, and Culture", in The
Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology, edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander et al. (2011)
Hawkins, Anne Hunsaker. Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography. West
Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1993.
Herman, David. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2002.
Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
Jurecic, Ann, Illness as Narrative (U of Minnesota P, 2012)
Kleinman, Arthur, The Illness Narratives (NY: Basic Books, 1986)
LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2001.
Laurent, Eric. "Alienation and Separation (I)." In Reading Seminar XI: Lacan's Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Including the First English Translation of
"Position of the Unconscious," edited by Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, and Marie
Jaanus, 19–28. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995.
Leys, Ruth. Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. "Narration as Repetition: The Case of Günter Grass's Cat
and Mouse." In Discourse in Psychoanalysis and Literature, edited by Shlomith
Rimmon-Kenan, 176–87. New York: Methuen, 1987.
------. "The Story of 'I': Illness and Narrative Identity." Narrative 10 (2002): 9–27. -----. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London: Routledge, 2002.
Rogers, Kim L., Selma Leydesdorff, and Graham Dawson, eds. Trauma and Life
Stories: International Perspectives. London: Routledge, 1999.
Rose, Gillian. Love's Work: A Reckoning with Life. London: Chatto and Windus, 1995.
Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978.
Wellbery, David. "Contingency." In Neverending Stories, edited by Ann Fehn,
Ingeborg Hoesterey, and Maria Tatar, 237–57. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1992.