In this course, we will explore how language and the available means of persuasion (rhetoric) create narratives about health, medicine, and illness across different genres (memoir, journalism, researched journal articles, popular texts) and disciplines (rhetoric, medicine, anthropology, psychology, literature). More specifically, we will examine the history of the clinic, doctor/patient relationships, the ethics of medical research, the language of diagnostics, mental health, addiction, and trauma. As we consider these themes, we will ask: what role does language play in the distribution of power? How and when do major stakeholders (researchers, governments, institutions, doctors, patients, journalists) participate? How can we communicate and act ethically in both the pursuit of our own health and well-being and that of others’? Students will have the opportunity to pursue a final project about health and medicine on the topic and in the genre of their choice. 

Possible texts include: Melonçon et al., Rhetoric of Health and Medicine As/Is; Plato, Gorgias and Phaedrus; Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic; Clare, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure; Jutel, Putting a Name to it; Cahalan, The Great Pretender; Charon, Narrative Medicine; Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias; Ikpi, I’m Telling the Truth, but I’m Lying; Lindsay, Rx; Lorde, The Cancer Journals; Jaouad, Life, Interrupted; and Restaino, Surrender: Feminist Rhetoric and Ethics in Love and Illness, Yerageau, Authoring Autism; Jack, Raveling the Brain: Toward a Transdiscplinary Neurorhetoric; Skloot, The Immortal Case of Henrietta Lacks; Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men; Harris, No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson; Rieder, In Pain: A Bioethicist’s Personal Struggle with Opioids; Strong, Dopesick (2021) miniseries; Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead, Teston, Doing Dignity: Ethical Praxis and the Politics of Care; Nishida, Just Care: Messy Entanglements of Disability, Dependency, and Desire; and Vega, Physicians of the Future: Doctor-Influencers, Patient-Consumers, and the Business of Functional Medicine. 

The institutions and ideology of empire famously crystallize in the middle of the nineteenth century, but its origins can be traced back much further. This seminar is concerned with the literature of the period, circa 1660 to 1800, which immediately precedes the consolidation of colonialist thought into an ambition of planetary dominion. More specifically, we examine the role that religion plays in the formation of Britain’s imperialist global imaginary. During the long eighteenth century, as this period is known, Britain ascends Europe’s geo-political order by way of settler colonialism, chattel slavery, war, and economic imperialism. Our course considers writers who draw on religious forms and affects to describe, naturalize, or resist these practices. 

How do these writers apply or adapt the teachings of Protestant Christianity and its “Others,” such as Catholicism, Quakerism, Islam, Hinduism, and Indigenous and Afro-Caribbean belief systems? What do their complex negotiations of religion say about the still-powerful historical narrative of “secularization,” the story of religion’s gradual decline? In what ways must this account change to accommodate the persistence, even intensification, of religiosity in, for example, work by Black British authors Ignatius Sancho and Quobna Cugoano? How do forms of religious thought shape literary forms, and vice versa? As we pursue these questions, we also attend to relationships between religious identity and other categories of difference, like race, class, nationality, gender, and sexuality. 

Although our methods derive from literary studies, this seminar is a scene of robust interdisciplinary exchange. We draw on the insights of historians, religion scholars, philosophers, and cultural anthropologists as well as literary critics. 

Building on recent scholarship in modernist studies on archives as a material resource, formal method, and theoretical category, this class will explore the centrality of archives to modern American poetry and scholarship (ca. 1900-present). 

This seminar will introduce students to archival research and methods, to relevant local and digital archives, to some theoretical work on archives, and to recent scholarship, particularly efforts to expand and diversify the modernist archive. However, we will not only consider archives as a scholarly resource for the study of American poetry, but will also explore how and why modern American poets have incorporated archives (personal, familial, historical) into their poetic projects.  We will study the diverse materials, forms, and genres of these archival projects, including long poems, documentary poems, collage-poems, poets' memoirs, poetic essays, poetic exhibitions, poet's novels, artists' books, and poetic drafts and revisions. A clear question that emerges from this body of work is how and why archives have generated so much American poetic experiment. Taking up Muriel Rukeyser's charge to "expand the document," as we explore more conventional archives (collections of and architectural repositories for “public records or other important historic documents” OED), we'll ask how these poetic works redefine and transform an understanding of the archive. 

This will be a particularly useful class for students interested in engaging in original archival research or beginning to think about thesis or dissertation projects. We will use resources at the Special Collections Library, Main Library, and GA Museum of Art; resources available digitally; and I am hoping to introduce the class to resources in Atlanta as well.