Precision Medicine: Science, Ethics, and

Precision Medicine:Sci,Et

This seminar will cover the scientific foundations of precision medicine and its social and ethical dimensions, alongside fundamental humanistic questions and challenges raised by this discipline. It is designed as an introduction to precision medicine accessible to the non-scientist student, but will also explore issues relevant to students who are planning a career in science or medicine.

• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• 3 points

SENIOR SEM-COMP LIT & SOCIETY

Prerequisites: CPLS UN3900 The senior seminar is a capstone course required of all CLS/MedHum majors and CLS concentrations. Only ICLS students may register. The seminar provides students the opportunity to discuss selected topics in comparative literature and society and medical humanities in a cross-disciplinary, multilingual, and global perspective. Students undertake individual research projects while participating in directed readings and critical dialogues about theory and research methodologies, which may culminate in the senior thesis. Students review work in progress and share results through weekly oral reports and written reports.

• W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• T 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Irina Kalinka
  Info
• Instructor: Brent H Edwards
  CULPA: 6 Wikipedia Info
• 3 points

SENIOR THESIS IN COMP LIT/SOC

This year-long, three-credit course is mandatory for students who will be writing their Senior Thesis in Comparative Literature and Society or in Medical Humanities. Students who wish to be considered for Departmental honors are required to submit a Senior Thesis. The thesis is a rigorous research work of approximately 40 pages, and it will include citations and a bibliographical apparatus. It may be written in English or, with the permission of the Director of Undergraduate Studies, in another language relevant to the students scholarly interests. Although modeled after an independent study, in which core elements of the structure, direction, and pace of the work are decided together by the student and their faculty thesis supervisor, students are nonetheless expected to complete certain major steps in the research and writing process according to the timeline outlined by the ICLS DUS.

• Instructor: Tadas Bugnevicius
  Info
• 1.5 points

HUMANISM AND THE HUMAN

The impetus of this course is to rethink the trajectory, conditions, and prospects of humanism, with a consideration of how such rethinking contributes to the reconfiguration of the Humanities in the present time. The impact of anti-humanist thinking in contemporary theory is taken as a point of departure, as a challenge that must be overcome. Hence, certain classic writings of Marx and Heidegger (and responses by Althusser, Derrida, and Said) are examined in detail in the initial 4 weeks of the course.However, in order to field this challenge in its full epistemological range, we will also engage with various discourses that respond to the question “what is human?” including recent discussions of animality (Derrida, Agamben, Haraway) and the exceptional challenge of feminist epistemology to traditionally gendered humanist assumptions (Irigaray, Haraway). The last third of the course examines what affirmations the question “what is human?” – though not answerable as such – mobilizes in three specific epistemological domains: psyche, pedagogy, politics. In this respect, the focus falls upon Castoriadis’ monumental response to Aristotle and Freud, as well as Derrida’s classic treatise on friendship. The course ends with a preliminary discussion of theories of the “post-human” in cognitive science, which will resonate against the discussions in the beginning of the course. This is a graduate course, open to exceptional senior undergraduates. A kind of basic background in Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud is assumed. The course addresses concerns of students throughout the humanities, but also certain theoretical tracks in the arts and humanistic tracks in the social sciences. It will also be of interest to students in the biological sciences, neuroscience, or cognitive science, who seek an opportunity to reflect on their disciplines from a philosophical standpoint.

• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Stathis Gourgouris
  CULPA: 4 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

A Comprehensive Introduction to Sigmund

FREUD: Theories and Origi

This course offers a comprehensive understanding of the origins, foundations and evolution of Freud’s psychoanalytic theorizing during the four decades following 1895. Via close readings of his texts, with neither worship nor condescension, we will situate the development of psychoanalysis as a theory of mind within historical context, and explore its applications to education, society, culture, and the humanities.

• W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• 4 points

Blood, Guts, and Lancets: Anatomy in Nin

Blood, Guts: Anatomy 19th

This seminar serves as an introduction to the historical rise of
anatomy
and
pathology
(the branches of medicine focused on the study of the human form and on the study of the diagnosis of disease, intimately connected with forensic science), by examining how medicine is represented in the prose fiction of the Romantic and Victorian periods. Together, our class will look at how anatomy became the basis of modern Western allopathic medicine, and why laboratory medicine emerged as a crucible for medico-scientific progress during the nineteenth century. As the physician’s practice turned away from concocting tinctures and remedies, medicine would now become grounded in scientific reasoning based on the mechanistic study of the human body—and its key procedure, the postmortem examination.

In the nineteenth century, a historical period that saw the first uses of the terms “autopsy” and “scientist,” literary writers were deeply engaged in the rise of anatomy, pathology, and forensics. Novels and short fiction served as a testing-ground for working out ideas about life and death in the complex sociocultural world of the Romantic and Victorian eras. In this course, as we read works by authors like Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Sheridan LeFanu, Emile Zola, H.G. Wells, R.L. Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Agatha Christie, we will consider the strange history of how “genre fiction” (gothic novels and detective stories) became a way of exploring the pathological in literary writing—while also containing its threats. By reading the medical writings of Humphry Davy, Matthew Baillie, Luigi Galvani, Claude Bernard, and Rudolf Virchow alongside these novels, we will see how the tropes we usually associate with literature fundamentally shaped the rise of laboratory and forensic medicine. And as we read the historical lifewriting of Robert Voorhis and Mary Seacole, we will think, too, about how the rise of anatomy in nineteenth-century medicine was tainted by the influence of (what was then called) “race science.”

Ultimately, we will consider why anatomy became a dominant motif in nineteenth-century fiction, and why genre fiction is still the “outhouse” (in Amitav Ghosh’s phrase) that keeps the pathological well apart from high realism. Along the way, a pathologist from the New York Medical Examiner’s Office will visit the class to talk about the legacies of the nineteenth century in modern

• M 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Arden A Hegele
  CULPA: 2 Info
• 3 points

TRAUMA AND PLEASURE

Can the words “trauma” and “pleasure” be put in the same sentence? If trauma epitomizes suffering and pleasure represents enjoyment, is there any relation between these experiences? And yet, how else to explain that people seem endlessly addicted to negative experiences, or that traumatized people often try to recreate the damage they endured?

We are living in an age of endless trauma, and everywhere we go, we hear that trauma is destructive, anathema to pleasure, that it destroys our sense of self, our security, our stability, and identity. We are taught to avoid trauma at all costs because it is harmful and inimical to flourishing. New statistics routinely confirm that we are living through a trauma epidemic in which ordinary people experience symptoms of extreme distress, flashbacks, intrusive thoughts, nightmares, and difficulty sleeping. Every year, new memoirs are published in which protagonists detail their endless battles with traumatic adversity and most television shows, across a variety of genres, include trauma as a subplot to character development (
Ted Lasso
,
Euphoria
,
True Detective
, to name a few). Referring to its growing pervasiveness, the
New Yorker
critic Parul Sehgal wrote a controversial essay, “The Case Against the Trauma Plot” (2021) in which she criticizes our culture’s overreliance on trauma as a primary trope of character development, forcing us to ask: is trauma really as widespread as we think? how did trauma become such a popular ‘identity’? what work is trauma doing for us, as individuals and as a culture? Is it possible to recognize the ubiquity of trauma while also acknowledging that we often seek situations which are harmful, even traumatizing, that we might be attracted to suffering for reasons we don’t yet understand?

This course examines the complex relationship between trauma and pleasure by familiarizing students with the clinical and theoretical concepts at the core of contemporary trauma and critical theory. We will focus specifically on the topics of: sexuality, perversion, trauma, identity, relationality, narcissism, gender and attachment in order to explore how these concepts work today. Delving into theoretical writing by Foucault, Bersani, Edelman, Berlant, Butler, Dean and Preciado, as well as clinical writing by major psychoanalysts, Freud, Laplanche, Loewald, Lacan, Laplanche and Winnicott, we will redefine contemporary debates by exploring their clinica

• T 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Gila Ashtor
  Info
• 4 points

The Mind Between Literature and the Brai

Mind Between Lit and Brai

What — to paraphrase Catherine Malabou — should literary studies
do
with neuroscience? How should critics and theorists approach the wealth of research about the neural bases of cognition? Should empirical findings about the brain supplant or complement interpretative and speculative theories of the psyche in the literary critic’s toolkit? Is the psyche and its “inner life” still a meaningful level of analysis for literary scholars? 
The field of “cognitive literary studies,” as the heterogeneous body of work drawing from research psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience is known, has steadily grown in stature over the last few decades, in lockstep with the burgeoning prominence of neuroscience in popular culture and within the academy. Some of its exponents argue that the rise of neuroscience must imply the decline of psychoanalysis and other “folk” psychologies. Others point to the constraints of reproducibility and of the empirical method as insur-mountable handicaps for the study of complex cultural objects such as literature.  
In this seminar, we will consider the literary experience as a whole — from the act of reading and comprehension, to the affective impact of reading and even the lifelong permanence in one’s memory and imagination of what Eve Sedgwick called “phantasy books” — and ask which parts of the experience can be fruitfully elucidated by reference to empirical knowledge about neural processes. Individual classes will focus on neuro-phenomenology, neuro-psychoanalysis, neuro-aesthetics, the neuroscience of reading, theory of mind, affect studies and critical theory.  
We complement these theoretical explorations with a small archive of twentieth-century writing (by Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Alain Robbe-Grillet, W.G. Sebald and Sarah Kane) that questions and subverts our assumptions about the representation of mental life in literary work.  
The course has no pre-requisites and it is open to undergraduate and graduate students.

• R 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Valerio Amoretti
  CULPA: 1 Info
• 3 points

The Narratology of Modernity

We have a consciousness of ourselves as placed specially in history, in an epoch which is essentially different from all that has come before: the modern. In respect of having such a discourse about ourselves, minimally, it may be true. Since at least the seventeenth century, intellectuals have been elaborating histories of modernity’s origin and theories of its distinction. This course does not attempt to adjudicate what is the true or best theory of the modern, but rather inquires into the discursive and historical conditions for telling narratives about modernity’s advent and constructing theories of its nature, and their aporiai. Topics will vary but may include the advent of “history” as a genre and non-Western “historical” genres; providential time, the saeculum, and prophecy; the dialectic of break and period; the delimiting of non-modernities, such as the primitive/traditional, the feudal, and the postmodern; the search for narrative agents, such as the nation, the state, and the class; schemes of the ontological disunity of modernity; modernism, the avant-garde, and the aesthetic forms of historicity; capitalism, socialism, and revolution; philosophy’s claim to historical diagnosis and the therapeutic refusal thereof; the desire for and attempts to construct anti-historical forms of narration and their limits.

• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Adam Leeds
  h-index: 2 Info
• 3 points

Advanced Topics in Medical Humanities

ADV TOPICS IN MED HUM

It is impossible to study Medical/Health Humanities now without emphasizing the COVID-19 pandemic and the social disparities it casts into relief.  This class studies how the arts can provide access to voices and perspectives on illness and health disparities that might be overlooked in news coverage, historical and sociological research on the current pandemic.    

 

This class begins by introducing the field of Medical/Health Humanities and the critical questions and tools it provides.  We will use these perspectives to study narrative and visual representations in different media that address the intersections of social inequity, biomedical pandemic, and aesthetic forms.  Our study of representations will be divided into four parts.  1.The last great global pandemic.  Representations of AIDS epidemic highlight the impact of social stigma on public health and medical care, as well as the use of art as an agent of activism and change.  We will consider such works as Tony Kushner’s
Angels in America
, Charles Burns’s
Black Hole,
short stories, and the art produced within and in response to the ACT-UP movement.

2.Race and medical inequity. We study the racialization of genetic science, and its connection new forms of white supremacy and a history of racialized health disparities.  Our readings include Rebecca Skloot’s
Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
, the poetry of Maya Angelou and Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and the speculative fiction of N.K. Jemison.  3.Fictional representations of pandemic that illuminate real life disparities in health and access to medical care will set the stage for our study of the current pandemic.  We will read Emily St. John Mandel’s
Station Eleven
and Colson Whitehead’s zombie novel,
Zone One
.  4.Literary representations of COVID, as represented by the short stories in
The Decameron Project
, as well as short film and visual arts. Seminar style classes will emphasize student interests and direction.  They will be heavily discussion-based with a combination of full class and smaller breakout formats.  Assignments include an in-class presentation and short paper on one week’s materials; a comparative narrative analysis, and an imaginative final project with a critical introduction.

• W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Sayantani T Dasgupta
  CULPA: 2 Info
• 3 points

INDEPENDENT STUDY

• Instructor: Joseph Albernaz
  CULPA: 4 Info
• 1-3 points