In the 21st century, disease seems to belong to the clean, well-lighted place of fact and biology. And yet, illness and medical treatment take place in culture and are complicated by language, history, economics, and politics. We’ll read a range of 20th-and 21st-century fiction and nonfiction: stories that ponder the limits of language; nonfiction about how different cultures define health, illness, and even death; texts that raise questions about the relationship between our brains and our selves; and narratives by physicians and patients that examine the meaning of embodied experience.
About Professor Jurecic
Ann Jurecic is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Rutgers University. She also serves as a book columnist for The Lancet and as an Associate Editor for the journal Literature and Medicine. Her first book, Illness as Narrative (2012), charts the emergence of personal writing about illness in the twentieth century. She recently co-authored a book about writing, Habits of the Creative Mind (2015). She teaches nonfiction writing and courses related to literature and medicine, and she is currently working on a study of twentieth- and twenty-first-century essayists.