01 TTH5 CAC 12186 JAFFE MU-211
Narrative medicine, a discipline largely built upon literary studies in confluence with healthcare, bridges cultural divides between sufferers and healers and offers a framework for reading and writing illness, person to person and person to text. Rita Charon, in Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness, writes that “A scientifically competent medicine alone cannot help a patient grapple with the loss of health and find meaning in illness and dying.”
In this class, we will study texts that serve up the humanity for which Charon calls, texts that teach readers how to bear witness, how to offer testimony, and how to closely read, not just texts, but people. In some ways, the writers we will encounter are what Arthur Frank calls “wounded storytellers,” people who use the experience of pain to give voice to the body. Someone who gives voice to the body engages in a complex dualistic enterprise. When one gives voice to one’s own body, the use of words requires the mind to reflect on the body, causing a separation. These words are important, but extremely hard to get right. We will explore how authors of fiction engage with listening to their own pain and listening to the pain of others.