In this course, we will examine literary narratives about health and illness, considering the body’s complicity in what Susan Sontag terms the “punitive and sentimental fantasies concocted” about illness. After some selected critical accounts of illness by Virginia Woolf and Sontag, we turn to fictional accounts by nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers. Alongside these literary texts, we may also examine selected historical case studies: hysteria, tuberculosis, shell shock, cholera, neurasthenia, cancer, HIV/AIDS, and others. In addition to a demanding reading schedule, this course requires regular
class participation, writing in and out of class, quizzes, and exams.