As we continue to grapple with the COVID-19 crisis, this course offers a portal into the depiction of health disasters in literature and cinema, across space and time. From the ravaging plagues in medieval and early modern Europe to the deadly flu outbreaks in the twentieth century, the spread of diseases has not only created panic and suffering, often disproportionately affecting vulnerable social groups, but also altered shapes of human society, language, and imagination. We will examine how the outbreak narratives expose a range of emotions: fear, grief, anxiety, as well as delirium and desire, often buried under the everyday life, bending literary genres, and even upending the barriers of gender, race, and class. The course is structured into four clusters: titled “Plague”, “Cholera”, “Malaria”, and “Flu”. In the cluster on plague, we start with the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal, set in the middle of the Black Death in Medieval Europe, and then read selections from Daniel Defoe’s The Journal of the Plague Year written in the eighteenth century, during the last outbreak of bubonic plague in London. In the cluster on cholera, we read the India born English novelist Rudyard Kipling’s short story “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes”, and the Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel Love in the Time of Cholera. In our study of the malarial narratives, we read Vernon Lee’s short story “A Wicked Voice” set in 19th century Italy and the South African writer Nadine Gordimer’s short story, “An Emissary”. In our concluding section on flu, we read the American author Katherine Anne Porter’s short novel Pale Horse, Pale Rider set during the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918, and close off the course with the 2013 Korean film Flu.
Link: https://healthhumanitiessyllabi.rice.edu/s/health-humanities-syllabus-repository/item/488
LIT 2000 examines the unique and changing role literature has played in individuals’ lives and in society. It is centered on three deceptively simple questions: What is literature? Why do we write literature? And why do we read literature? It introduces students to a range of literary genres, from different countries and historical periods. Among the primary aims of this course is to help students develop the critical skill of analysis and interpretation. Students will also learn how formal and stylistic elements as well as historical context shape the meaning and significance of literature. By becoming more skillful readers of literature and its contexts, students become better readers of the worlds that literature addresses, develop their ability to decipher meaning from language, and better understand their own interactions with science, technology, media, commerce, and politics. Required Texts: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htmLinks to an external site.
