Mar 28, 2024  
2012-2013 HillBook (Class of 2016) 
    
2012-2013 HillBook (Class of 2016) [ARCHIVED HILL BOOK]

ENG 123 - “In Sickness and in Health”: Bodies in Literature

Three Credits
Spring Semester

Our thematic focus is the representation of human bodies in the works of poets, dramatists, novelists, and film makers at various significant moments in western cultural history. As we read some famous and influential literary texts alongside less familiar works, we will become acquainted with key concepts and methodologies employed in literary studies. The course is divided into two conceptual blocks: one is devoted to representations of the monstrous body, a subject that has preoccupied writers (and filmmakers) for a very long time and produced some of the great classics of the western literary canon two of which we read this semester, Frankenstein and The Metamorphosis. The other centers on the relationship between literature and medicine, and ranges widely from Giovanni Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century account of the plague in Florence to David Feldshuh’s late-twentieth century play about the infamous Tuskegee experiment in 1930s rural Alabama, to poetry by practicing physicians and healthcare workers

Fulfills the Cornerstone Literature Requirement.