Topics in English and American Literature

Around 16% of the world's population currently lives with a significant disability. This lived experience shapes the lives, loves, and dreams of so many. How do we relate to bodies in pain, whether our own, those of a loved one, or those of strangers across the world? And is it possible to truly translate pain into language? Many nineteenth-century writers struggled with disability and illness, from William Blake (visual hallucinations that branded him a "madman"), Jane Austen (likely Addison's disease), Keats (tuberculosis), George Gordon Byron (clubfoot), Thomas De Quincey (opium addiction), and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (opium addiction and something like IBS) to Edgar Allan Poe (depression, addiction, & possible bipolar disorder), Eliza Suggs (osteogenesis imperfecta), Helen Keller (blindness and deafness), and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (postpartum depression). Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Jacobs describe the irrevocable changes to their bodies, wrought by slavery. This semester, we will read key works in disability studies alongside works by the above authors, in context of their embodied experience. We will also think more broadly about how disability, pain, and illness was portrayed in the period-particularly studying how it was often used as a trope for heightening gothic drama: dwarfs, mute mermaids, and blind princes in fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm; Victor Frankenstein's Creature or his own "illness" that arises after his science experiments; eerie body-swaps in Mary Shelley's "Transformation;" contagion in Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter;" Hugo's Hunchback of Notre-Dame; madwomen in the attic and fire-burns in Jane Eyre; stuttering in Billy Budd; Ahab's prosthetic leg in Moby-Dick; bipolar disorder in the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; or the body of Dorian Gray, which is never marked by time or illness. Frequently, too, was disability envisaged as magically curable, as in Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, or

Course Attributes: EN H; AS HUM; FA HUM; AR HUM

Topics in English and American Literature

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 420A

Section 01