Document Type
Syllabus
Publication Date
Fall 9-1-2024
Course Description
Even four years removed from the COVID-19 pandemic, with its freshly remembered social and economic shocks and aftershocks, we still sometimes think of it as unprecedented. In fact, as Camus suggests, it has many precedents. As an essential facet of human biological and historical experience, pandemics have left long and discernable trails through literature. By following these trails, we can discover how contagion has shaped our consciousness, changing the ways we think about nature, the body, society, modernity, government, and God. Our readings will range widely from ancient and medieval accounts of bubonic plague to emergent post-COVID literature. In addition to fiction, we will explore science writing on disease, histories of specific pandemic events, and recent essays about the impact of COVID-19 on literature and culture. Ultimately, we will find, as the historian Jill Lepore writes, that “in the literature of pestilence, the greatest threat isn’t the loss of human life but the loss of what makes us human.” As Lepore suggests, pandemic pushes us to the edge of the literary and the human, often rendering language powerless and making people brute. What happens at this outer edge of human experience, where language and literature confront a crisis that surprises us no matter how often it happens?
Recommended Citation
Brown, Harry, "ENG 255A Literature and Pandemic Brown Fall 2024" (2024). All Course Syllabi. 680, Scholarly and Creative Work from DePauw University.
https://scholarship.depauw.edu/records_syllabi/680
Student Outcomes
Learning goals and outcomes. In writing-intensive (W) courses, the content becomes a medium for developing your intellectual abilities through writing. The course will help you (1) to order and to derive deeper meaning from the thoughts and impressions that constitute our basic response to experience, including reading literature; (2) to understand the relation between literature and pandemics within a range of historical and geographical contexts; (3) to draw connections between literary worrks produced by different writers, in different periods, in different parts of the world; and (4) to write critically and creatively about what we find.