This 15 CAT module will introduce you to the rich creative and critical work in medical humanities and disability arts, thinking about what literature, lifewriting, film and graphic fiction might offer to the understanding and critique of the practice of medicine and conceptions of illness and disability. The module spans the twentieth and twenty-first century, investigating medical humanities writing from as early as 1926 and as late as 2022, but it concentrates its attention on the last twenty years, introducing recent work and theory in relation to physical disability, chronic illness and severe mental health conditions. It also encourages you to think not only about the psychological, phenomenological and social dimensions of illness and disability, but also the new forms of creativity, art and narrative that such experiences have produced.

In the wake of Covid-19, issues such as chronic illness and mental health have gained new complexity and greater prominence in the social and cultural landscapes. You will explore new writing and answer questions about how language and form can hope to represent such subjective and non-normative experiences as pain and psychosis, as well as thinking about how to create narrative about experiences that frustrate traditional linear story-telling, such as chronic illness, or terminal illness. You will learn new theoretical and critical skills useful on other modules, as well as participating in research-led teaching at the forefront of a rapidly developing field. Experiences and identities of illness and disability are of course intersectional, and the module will foreground the intersections of illness and disability with race, gender, sexuality and age.

This module has big ambitions -- we will in our collective work contribute to the cutting edge of the field of critical medical humanities, expand current understandings of the corpus of illness and disability literature and culture, and explore new forms for representing, expressing and examining experiences of non-normative embodiment.

**This module would complement the 15 CAT IATL module 'Navigating Psychopathology' (likely to run in term 1) very well, if students are looking for something to pair it with: Navigating Psychopathology (warwick.ac.uk)

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Week 1

Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (1978): Chapters One and Two

Arthur Frank, The Wounded Storyteller (1995): Chapter Three: 'Illness as a Call for Stories'; Chapter Five: 'The Chaos Narrative: Mute Illness'

Week 2: Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals (1980) [memoir/ political essay]

We will start by looking at Lorde's account of her experience of breast cancer and mastectomy, thinking about intersectional experiences of illness, pain, embodiment and visible difference--their phenomenology and their politics.

We will likely focus on the following passages, though you should read all of the short text:

Silence, Voice, Pain, Feeling: 8-20 ("I have learned much [Part III of Introduction]" to "To put it another way, I feel always tender in the wrong places"

Care and the Love of Good Women: 32-41

Prosthesis: 52-54; 57-58

Week 3: Anne Boyer, The Undying: A Meditation on Modern Illness (2019) [critical memoir]

The Undying: 201-202

Illness, treatment and 'choice': 15-19; 83-87;199-200

The Writer in the sickroom: 91-102; 115-20; 129-35

Illness, capitalism and the poetry of debt: 151-61

Pain: 209-220; 237-242

Exhaustion: 245-252

The gorgeous frame of mortality: 279-291

Critical reading for Part I:

Excerpts from Anne Hunsaker Hawkins, Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography (1998)

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Week 4: Hilary Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost (2003) [autofiction/memoir]

This week we will focus on Mantel's wonderful literary memoir, Giving up the Ghost. It would be great if you had read the whole thing -- it isn't too long or onerous -- but we will focus on the first Part ('Second Home') pp. 1-25, i.e. the whole thing, and the last Part ('Show Your Workings'), especially pp. 167-218 in the Fourth Estate edition (from "Writing about your past is like blundering through your house" to "I sat down and wrote another book").

We will also look at some extracts from Sarah Manguso's memoir, The Two Kinds of Decay (2008) as below -- but do read on / around these depending on your interests:

'The Beginning'; 'Signs'; 'Bad Blood'; 'Metaphors' (pp. 1-15)

'Causation' (21-22)

'Paralyzed'; 'Death' (49-53)

Care: 'Juan'; 'Fear and Fright'; 'Color'; 'The Chair' (74-81); 'The Old Neurologist'; 'The New Neurologist' (85-89)

Attention: 'Attention' (106-109); 'The Point and the Ray' (165-166)

Knowing, Measuring: 'Memory'; 'Relevance', 'Measuring' (174-182)

'The End' (183-4)

Week 5: Sarah Rose Etter, The Book of X (2019) [YA speculative fiction]

This is an intriguing recent work of speculative fiction about a being born and living with a painful and stigmatising congenital condition, as well as about the experience of extreme loneliness. It is often spoken about as participating in the subgenre of (women's) body horror, as well as speculative fiction (and YA fiction -- though I'd hesitate to recommend it to my just-teen daughter). The juxtaposition of illness and loneliness is troubling, as is the whole plot, and we will discuss how far we want to focus on this novel (amidst other options). But it is interesting for taking up the themes of the module, as well as adjacent issues to do with gender and embodiment, in the idiom of speculative fiction to create a work full of ambiguous but suggestive symbols.

We will also look this week at Tessa Brunton's graphic novel, Notes from a Sickbed (2022)

Critical reading for Part II:

from Kathlyn Conway, Beyond Words: Illness and the Limits of Expression (2007)

from Meghan O'Rourke, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness (2022)

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Week 7: The Endgame Project.

Samuel Beckett's Not I (play) and Touretteshero

We will look this week at disability and neurodiversity in relation to the work of Samuel Beckett. We will focus on two disabled-led productions of Beckett's work: a production of Beckett's Endgame by movie actors with Parkinson's Disease (2021) [play/documentary]; and a 202 production of Beckett's Not I by writer/actor/performer/director Jess Thom (aka Touretteshero).

Week 8:

Terry Galloway, Mean Little Deaf Queer (2009) [memoir]

We will focus this week on Terry Galloway's 2009 memoir about her life experience with deafness and as a queer performer and writer (and lover).

from Keah Brown, The Pretty One: On Life, Pop Culture, Disability and Other Reasons to Fall in Love with Me (2019) [essays]

Critical reading for Part III:

Ato Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (Columbia UP, 2007)

Matt Hargrave, Theatres of Learning Disability: Good, Bad or Plain Ugly? (Springer, 2016)

Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999)

Week 9: Janet Frame, An Angel at My Table (1984) [memoir]

Jane Campion (dir.), An Angel at My Table (1990) [film]

Lodge H. Kerrigan (dir.), Clean, Shaven (1993) [short film]

We will look this week at New Zealand author Janet Frame's literary autobiography, An Angel at My Table, and the acclaimed film based on this work. We will also look briefly at Lodge Kerrigan's short arthouse film depicting his own experience of psychosis, Clean Shaven.

Week 10:

from Marguerite Sechehaye, Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl [clinical memoir] (1951)

from Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias (2019) [essays]

Critical reading for Part IV:

Angela Woods, The Sublime Object of Psychiatry: Schizophrenia in Clinical and Cultural Theory (OUP, 2011)

Matthew Broome, 'The Neuroscience, Psychopathology, and Philosophy of Time', Philosophy, Psychiatry, Psychology, vol. 12, no. 3 (2005): 187-194

Stephen Harper, 'The Suffering Screen: Cinematic Portrayals of Mental Distress', Madness, Power and the Media (Springer, 2009): 59-102

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Assessment

Essay (3000/4000 words)

Critical bibliography (800 words) -- descriptive bibliography of sample entries for an anthology: an affirmative collection of writing on illness and/or disability.