Undergraduate Course: Medicine in Literature 1: Illness Narratives through History (ENLI10355)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Humanities and Social Science |
| Course type | Standard |
Availability | Available to all students |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 3 Undergraduate) |
Credits | 20 |
| Home subject area | English Literature |
Other subject area | None |
| Course website |
http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/literatures-languages-cultures/english-literature/undergraduate/current/honours |
Taught in Gaelic? | No |
| Course description | This course aims to develop the student¿s understanding of the history of medicine and its influence on literature through the ages; of the relationship between this development and other discourses of embodiment; of the emergence of various illness narratives; of the relationship between these and various major historical discoveries, developments and events.
The course will achieve these aims by reading poems, plays and novels from antiquity to the present day, alongside various non-fiction sources. This course is, however, not merely a historical overview. It will allow students to examine the ways in which discourses of embodiment and the view of the sick body change according to shifting political, social and cultural contexts.
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Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
| Displayed in Visiting Students Prospectus? | No |
Course Delivery Information
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| Delivery period: 2013/14 Semester 1, Available to all students (SV1)
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Learn enabled: Yes |
Quota: 15 |
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Web Timetable |
Web Timetable |
| Class Delivery Information |
1 hour(s) per week for 10 week(s): attendance at autonomous learning group at time to be arranged |
| Course Start Date |
16/09/2013 |
| Breakdown of Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
200 )
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| Additional Notes |
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| Breakdown of Assessment Methods (Further Info) |
Please contact the School directly for a breakdown of Assessment Methods
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| No Exam Information |
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| Delivery period: 2013/14 Semester 1, Part-year visiting students only (VV1)
|
Learn enabled: Yes |
Quota: None |
|
Web Timetable |
Web Timetable |
| Class Delivery Information |
1 hour(s) per week for 10 week(s): attendance at autonomous learning group at time to be arranged |
| Course Start Date |
16/09/2013 |
| Breakdown of Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
200 )
|
| Additional Notes |
|
| Breakdown of Assessment Methods (Further Info) |
Please contact the School directly for a breakdown of Assessment Methods
|
| No Exam Information |
Summary of Intended Learning Outcomes
| In addition to the skills training common to all English Literature Honours courses (essay-writing, independent reading, group discussion, oral presentation, small-group autonomous learning), students will acquire a broad understanding of the way in which literary forms have been the vehicles through which our understanding of illness has been articulated. |
Assessment Information
One coursework essay of 2,500 words (25%).
Final assessment will consist of an examination essay of 3,000 words for both intercalated BA students and English Literature students (75%).
Visiting Student (Semester 1 only) Assessment
1 essay of 2,500 words (25%);
1 exam essay of 3,000 words (75%) |
Special Arrangements
| None |
Additional Information
| Academic description |
Not entered |
| Syllabus |
1. Introduction: Historicising Medicine in Fiction: Extract from Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex (1990); extract from Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind (1997)
2. Galenic Medicine, Potency and Madness in Ancient drama: Euripides, Herakles (c. 416 BC); Sophocles, Oedipus Rex (c. 429 BC); extract from Galen, On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body (c. 200 AD)
3. Plagues, madness and love sickness: Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1380); Robert Henryson, The Testament of Cresseid (c. 1480)
4. The Four Humours, Illness and Early Modern Drama: Ben Johnson, The Alchemist (c. 1610); William Shakespeare, The Tempest (c. 1611); extract from Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621)
5. Poetry, Passion, and Consumption: Selection of poetry from John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley; Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (1978)
6. Nursing, the Sick Room and Sacrifice: Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruth (1853); Harriet Martineau, Life in the Sickroom (1844)
7. War Torn Bodies and the Health Institution: Selection of poetry from Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke.
8. ESSAY WRITING WEEK
9. Identities in Sickness: Michael Cunningham, The Hours (1998); Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925); On Being Ill (1930)
10. Madness and Literature: Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963); Sarah Kane, 4.48 Psychosis (2000)
11. Illness as Art: Jean Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (1997); extract from Bob Flanagan, Sick (1997)
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| Transferable skills |
Not entered |
| Reading list |
Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex (1990)
Howard Brody, Stories of Sickness (2003)
Frederick F. Cartwright, Disease and History (1972)
Rita Charon, Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness (2008)
Yasmin Gunaratnam and David Oliviere, Narrative and Stories in Healthcare: Illness, Dying, and Bereavement (2009)
A. F. Kleinman, The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition (1988)
Jeffrey Meyers, Disease and the Novel, 1880-1960 (1985)
Roy Porter, Bodies Politic: Disease, Death and Doctors in Britain, 1650-1900 (2001)
Carole Rawcliffe, Leprosy in Medieval England (2009)
Tory Vandeventer, Women and Disability in Medieval Literature (2011)
Jonathan Gil Harris, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism and Disease in Shakespeare's England (2003)
Gail Kern Paster, Humouring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (2004)
Rebecca Totaro, Suffering in Paradise: The Bubonic Plague in English Literature from More to Milton (2005)
Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (1999)
Katharine Byrne, Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination (2011)
Athena Vrettos, Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture (1995)
Diana Berry and Campbell Mackenzie (eds.), The Legacy of War: Poetry, Prose, Painting and Physic (1995)
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| Study Abroad |
Not entered |
| Study Pattern |
Not entered |
| Keywords | Not entered |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Ms Karin Sellberg
Tel:
Email: |
Course secretary | Ms Sheila Strathdee
Tel: (0131 6)50 3619
Email: |
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