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Jul 10, 2025
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2024-2025 Undergraduate Hill Book
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ENG 100/123 - ”In Sickness and in Health”: Bodies in Literature3 Credits
Offered periodically
This course presents an introduction to the study and appreciation of literature. Our thematic focus is the representation of human bodies in the works of poets, dramatists, novelists, and essayists 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. We follow, more or less, a historical track and begin the semester with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which set the standard for literary representations of the body, before turning to one of Shakespeare’s more obscure works, Titus Andronicus, a bloody revenge drama, Miss Evers’ Boys, a play about the infamous Tuskegee experiment, and finally Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, a tale about a man who wakes one morning to find that he has turned into an insect. Midway through the course we will also read poetry by physicians and other health care workers. We examine films that deal with questions about human embodiment, but most of our time is devoted to the close reading of texts, to formulating arguments about literature, and to exploring methods of interpretation.
Core Curriculum Attribute(s): Language, Arts, and Humanities
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