Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Team-taught course exploring how English literature engages with, reflects, and interrogates pandemic disease, starting with the "Black Death" in the fourteenth-century and moving through contemporary literary responses to pandemic crises. Will introduce students to the literature of disease and contagion across time periods, literary genres, and cultural traditions.

COURSE DETAILS:

We have been here before.

On March 11, 2020, the World Health organization declared COVID-19, the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, to be a global pandemic. In the months since, we have seen our lives change in ways both dramatic and mundane, and we have watched as the ongoing aftershocks of the disease ripple across the cultural, social, economic, and academic structures that, for better and for worse, we have long taken for granted. As many people have noted, it seems like the world has fundamentally changed in only a few short months.

As "novel" as the novel-coronavirus pandemic might feel to us, however, this is hardly the first time that pandemic disease has made its mark on the world. In 1347, a virulent strain of the bacteria Yersinia pestis spread out across Europe, North Africa, and Asia and killed upwards of 50% of their population, a cataclysm now commonly referred to as the Black Death. No less deadly were the diseases that Europeans first brought to the shores of North and South America: smallpox, typhus, influenza, and others. Such diseases decimated Indigenous populations and are thus inextricably bound up with settler colonialism, in all of its manifold horrors. Indeed, the story of pandemic disease is never only the story of the disease itself. It is, more accurately, the story of how that disease shapes and is shaped by the cultures around it, how it catalyzes social movements and ignites protest and backlash, how it alternately highlights systems of inequality and levels social difference, how it changes the way we live, think, feel, love, read, write, and die.

By both engaging the specificities of individual disease outbreaks and touching on the universality of pandemic itself, literature provides one important lens through which we can examine and understand the impact of pandemic disease. This team-taught class will explore not only how diseases such as plague, influenza, AIDS, and covid-19 (about which literature is only now emerging) have informed literature but also, and more important, how literature responds to and informs our experience of pandemic itself.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

Literary Mindedness: By the end of the course, the student will have had the opportunity to learn how literature from a broad range of national and cultural traditions, as well as across periods, responds to and engages with pandemic disease.

Literary Knowledge: By the end of the course, the student will have had the opportunity to read important texts from the English literary tradition and will have considered the role of disease and contagion within them.

Analytical Proficiency: By the end of the course, the student will have been introduced to practical skills in the field of literary analysis, as well as in the specific topical approaches of the course.

Research Proficiency: This is not a research intensive course; however, by the end of the course, the student will have had the opportunity to perform some basic contextualizing and investigative research.

Cultural Literacy: By the end of the course, the student will have had the opportunity to learn how literary works can reflect, interrogate, and generate their specific cultural, social, and intellectual environments, particularly in regard to the pandemic disease.

Grading

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

Because of the uncertainty of book-ordering during the pandemic, students are encouraged to begin obtaining their course texts as early as possible. All of the texts for this course are available in both print and digital editions and can be ordered through online distributors and local book shops.

REQUIRED READING: