ENGL531

'Odd to think that the piece of you I know best is already dead. The cells on the surface of your skin are thin and flat without blood-vessels or nerve-endings.' - Jeanette Winterson, 'The Cells, Tissues, Systems and Cavities of the Body'. This paper explores literature's engagement with the medicalised body and mind, mapping out the arts' responses to medical advances, beginning with the mid-nineteenth century and ending at the present day. We will study late nineteenth-century reactions to the scare of germs, vaccinations, and nervous disorders, move through the dark period of eugenics in the early twentieth century, and arrive at contemporary engagements with immune diseases and cancer, looking too at current political usages of the medicalised body. Incorporating film, novels, short stories, plays, and poetry, this paper will also draw on philosophical and medical texts to engage with illnesses and disorders in the body, mind, and nation-state. Authors such as G.B. Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Donna Haraway, Susan Sontag, Gerald Callahan, and Peter Sloterdijk will be included.