ENGL 103 B20: Case Studies in Research: Bodies, Disrupted Lives, and the Work of Healing: Explorations of Meaning

D. Woodman

This section of ENGL 103 will explore illness or medical themes in a variety of contexts and genres. We will read Cheraline Dimaline's The Marrow Thieves, an Indigenous speculative fiction about colonial violation of Indigenous bodies by harvesting their marrow for their dreams, and Kazuo Ishiguro's What We All Long For, speculative fiction in which clones are raised solely for human biomedical needs. We will also read Bitter Medicine, a graphic memoir by brothers Clem and Olivier Martini about living with schizophrenia in Klein-era Alberta. Our final major text will be neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi's literary memoir When Breath Becomes Air, an exploration of mortality and meaning written just before his death at 37 years of age.

We will also look at some short texts: Dr. Janet Gilsdorf's "Simple Song of Gratitude," Dr. Hatim Kanaaneh's "Neck Swelling," Susan Sontag's "Illness as Metaphor," and Arthur Frank's "The Body's Problem with Illness." And we will watch Dr. Rita Charon's "Honoring the Stories of Illness" TEDtalk, a discussion of her groundbreaking work in narrative medicine.

All these texts, in their different ways, combine disruptive experiences of illness with larger questions about how we think about living when experiencing existential and ontological disruption, when powerful forces shape those experiences, and when we are confronted by questions about meaning.