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.

TALIS Reading List: EN2M4/EN3M4: Sick Imagination: Illness, Disability, and the Critical Medical Humanities | University of Warwick (talis.com)

Week 1

Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (1978): Chapter One

Arthur Frank, The Wounded Storyteller (1995): Chapter Three: 'Illness as a Call for Stories'

Virginia Woolf, from 'On Being Ill' (1925)

---

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:

Go to the electronic version via the TALIS reading list: EN2M4/EN3M4: Sick Imagination: Illness, Disability, and the Critical Medical Humanities | University of Warwick (talis.com)

Silence, Voice, Pain, Feeling: 10-15 ("I have learned much [Part III of Introduction]" to "To put it another way, I feel always tender in the wrong places")

Care, Gender, Touch, Stigma: 20-24 ("Perhaps I can say all this more simply; I say the love of good women healed me" to "the slightest touch meanwhile threatened to be unbearable." )

Prosthesis: 27-28 "'You're not wearing a prosthesis'" to "Who can ever really have power over me again?"; 29 "Attitudes towards the necessity for prostheses" to "the concerted pressures of our demands cannot change that."

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

---

Critical reading for Part I:

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

---

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").

You may also be interested in Sarah Manguso's memoir, The Two Kinds of Decay (2008), about her diagnosis with a rare chronic blood disorder. Recommended sections as below -- but do read on / around these depending on your interests. (We may make reference to some passages but I will bring those to the session.)

'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 potentially quite troubling, as is the whole plot. 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. I was a bit nervous of putting this on the module but it was widely appreciated and written about last year and I think led to some really astute thinking and writing.

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)

If you want another take on this subject, do have a look at Tessa Brunton's graphic novel, Notes from a Sickbed (2022)

---

Week 7: The Endgame Project.

Samuel Beckett's Not I (play) and Touretteshero

To read: Beckett's plays Endgame (1957) and Not I (1972) -- published individually or in the Faber Complete Dramatic Works. Both versions available electronically on the library catalogue.

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 2017 production of Beckett's Not I by writer/actor/performer/director Jess Thom (aka Touretteshero).

Look at some video material on the Endgame Project here: ME TO PLAY – When the body gives way, all that's left is soul. (theendgameproject.com)

And read Jess Thom's first account of engaging with Beckett's Not I here: Not I and Me | Touretteshero

Critical reading: Hannah Simpson, Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).

[Further reading: 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)]

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: 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]

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.

Week 10:

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

---

Assessment

Critical bibliography (800 words) -- descriptive bibliography of sample entries for an anthology: an affirmative collection of writing on illness and/or disability. (30%) Deadline: Term 1, Week 10 Tuesday 03.12.24

Essay (3000/4000 words) Deadline: Term 2, Week 1 Friday 10.01.25

---

Secondary Reading

Angela Woods, 'Rethinking “Patient Testimony” in the Medical Humanities: The Case of Schizophrenia Bulletin’s First Person Accounts', Journal of Literature and Science [J Lit Sci], vol. 6, no. 1 (2012): 38–54

Essay Ideas

1. “[L]et a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head and language at once runs dry”: discuss the representation of pain in one or more works that you have read/watched/studied.
2. How do one or more works of pathography and/or illness memoir address the challenges to narrative coherence of chronic illness?
3. “The most truthful way of regarding illness--and the healthiest way of being ill—is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking” (Susan Sontag). Discuss in relation to one or more work of critical or creative writing.
4. "[T]he treatment of any disease, and cancer in particular, must be all of a piece, body and mind” (Audre Lorde, ‘A Burst of Light’). Discuss.
5. “I keep thinking. I have cancer. I'm a black lesbian feminist poet, how am I going to do this now? Where are the models for what I'm supposed to be in this situation? But there were none. That is it, Audre. You’re on your own" (The Cancer Journals (1997), 28). How far, and how, is illness an intersectional experience? Refer to one or mor works you have read or viewed.
6. Those with chronic illness often find that people doubt the veracity of their illness: a form of “identity theft” in which you “lose narrative authority over your life” (Jonathan Adler). Discuss in relation to one or more texts/ works of visual culture.
7. “Whether ill people want to tell stories or not, illness calls for stories.” (Frank, 54) Discuss in relation to one or more works of fiction, lifewriting or visual culture.
8. “Some people dislike diagnoses […] calling them boxes and labels, but I’ve always found comfort in preexisting conditions” (Wang). What are the pros and cons of a ‘label’ in the illness experience?
9. “[H]ow the false, when perfectly enacted, can be even more poignant than the true” (Galloway). How might the concept of ‘passing’ be pertinent to the experience of those living with disability?
10. Discuss the “stare” as a violent, intrusive and/or transformative “ocular interaction” (Garland Thomson) in the context of disability experience.
11. “I know that these are my people in ways that those who have never experienced psychosis can’t understand, and to shun them is to shun a large part of myself” (Esmé Weijun Wang). Discuss the value and challenge of considering illness and/ or disability as a minority community.
12. “[W]e need neither a whole-hearted acceptance nor an outright rejection of cure, but rather a broad-based grappling” (Clare, Brilliant Imperfection, 2017: 14). Write about the concept of ‘cure’ in one or more works of illness writing/film/culture.
13. “Complaining of fatigue sounds like a moral weakness” (Meghan O’Rourke). Consider the relationship between illness and moral judgement in one or more texts and/or works of visual culture.
14. Write understanding Beckett’s Not I, or any other work of theatre, a) through disabled-led production and/or b) “in the context of neurodiversity”.
15. , I was doomed to wander forever in a world that was not mine, in a body that was not mine.” (Esmé Weijun Wang). How far can literary writing (fiction or non-fiction) help us to understand the lived experience of schizophrenia?
16. “For those of us living with severe mental illness, the world is full of cages where we can be locked in” (Esmé Weijun Wang). Write about the experience, ethics and/or representation of institutionalization in the context of mental illness, drawing on one or more texts/ cultural works you have encountered.
17. “All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land” (Frame). How far does writing itself act to address and/or mitigate the social exclusion or othering experienced in relation to illness/disability?
18. “Temporary masks, I knew, had their place; everyone was wearing them, they were the human rage; but not masks cemented in place until the wearer could not breathe and was eventually suffocated” (Frame). Write about masks and/or masking in one or more works you have encountered.