In recent years, interdisciplinary scholarship subsumed under the umbrella term ‘Medical Humanities’ has drawn attention to the manifold ways literature and culture negotiate illness and other issues of medicine and health care. This, however, is not a novel phenomenon. From Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c. 1400), Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), and eighteenth-century smallpox poetry to Albert Camus’s The Plague (1947), Tony Kushner’s two-part play about the AIDS epidemic, Angels in America (1991/1992), and Emma Donoghue’s The Pull of The Stars (2020): literature has always been preoccupied with the outbreak and spread of disease. In this course, we will discuss how these and similar texts not only engage with concrete historical epidemics but also position illness and contagion as metaphors of political disorder and moral corruption. In addition, we will examine the extent to which many such texts, not least those published during the Covid-19 pandemic, challenge their own limitations when it comes to portraying the shared sense of vulnerability and anxiety in global health crises, and how they themselves produce medial and generic cross-contagions or mutations.
- Lehrende/r: Marlena Tronicke