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Instructors: Tanja Reiffenrath
Event type:
Proseminar
Org-unit: Anglistik/Amerikanistik
Displayed in timetable as:
Hours per week:
2
Language of instruction:
Englisch
Min. | Max. participants:
- | 50
Literature:
Primary reading material, as well as excerpts from selected secondary texts will be made available in a reader at the beginning of the semester.
Comment:
In The Wounded Storyteller, Arthur Frank contends that "illness becomes a circulation of stories, professional and lay, but not all stories are equal" (5). In this course, we will therefore probe the ways in which voice and agency figure in the context of illness and disability.
We will begin by analyzing representations of disease and disability that deny the suffering individuals the power to speak for themselves: "They’re here, they’re real and they’re alive! Freaks, wonders and human curiosities!" Focusing on P. T. Barnum’s "Grand Traveling Museum," a nineteenth century museum of ‘freaks,’ and the photography of Charles Eisenmann in the late 1880s, we will examine the means that turn disabled bodies into a spectacle and interrogate the practice of looking, or rather, staring. In this context, we will also consider Diane Arbus’s famous array of freak photographs (1960s) that have frequently been criticized for being exploitative and voyeuristic.
Similarly, Oliver Sacks’s popular scientific writings on curious neurological diseases (e.g. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, 1985) have been criticized for presenting readers with a modern version of the freak show. Yet at the same time, they have also been highly acclaimed for returning the experience and voice of the patient to the medical discourse, an issue that we will discuss in the second section of this course. Here we will read literary texts from the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century in which patients begin to question their place in medical narratives by foregrounding their individual experiences, such as Oliver Sacks’s A Leg to Stand On (1984), Anatole Broyard’s Intoxicated by My Illness (1992), and Jonathan Franzen’s "My Father’s Brain" (2001).
In the last section of this course we will explore writings and visual representations that counter the social stigmata associated with illness and disability, e.g. Simi Linton’s My Body Politic (2007), and discuss significant political events like the Capitol Crawl Up protest in 1990 that challenge the status of disabled persons in American society.
We will complement our analyses of these texts by relevant secondary literature on illness narratives, as well as critical literature from the field of disability studies.
Important notes:
Please note: you can only receive credits for a cultural studies course in this class!
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