FRENCH 327 A Fascination with Bodies: The Doctor's Malady
Bodies: their health, their beauty, resilience, strength, and flexibility. Their radiance. Smooth skin and lean muscles. Bodies in motion, walking, running, dancing, skipping, and jumping.
Bodies transforming themselves, always evolving, through the metamorphosis of puberty, the monstrosity of pregnancy, the impact of aging.
Bodies in pain, bodies deformed, bodies immobilized, bodies transfigured by illness, disease or madness.
Controlling the body, its cravings, its curves, and its appetites, its restlessness or sluggishness. Controlling the body, its fevers, rashes, spasms, addictions; its pain, its broken limbs and voices, its fluids and wounds.
Throughout the ages, bodies and minds have fascinated and lured the attention of healers and physicians but also of painters, writers, choreographers, philosophers and historians, and in the twentieth century photographers and filmmakers.
In our course, we will examine the representation of bodies in painting, photography, film and writing: novels, plays, short stories, medical and sociological essays.
The focus of our study will be the interplay between doctors and patients, the addictive nature of their relationship, dependent on the body and the mind and initially based on the five senses: touch, sight, hearing, smell and taste.
From Michelet's treaties on women and Charcot's observations in his writings and photographs of "les grandes hystériques," writers in the nineteenth century were drawn to the figure of the doctor, always of course male, and in his ministrations to his patients. Together with Germinie Lacerteux, a key text will be Barbey d'Aurevilly's short story, "Le Bonheur dans le crime."
A portion of the course will concentrate on the phases of bodily development from puberty to old age notably in La Voyeuse interdite by Nina Bouraoui and novellas by Annie Ernaux, L'Evenement and Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit.
However the constant object of our scrutiny will be how illness and disease as well as their impact on family structures are transcribed in literary texts, memoirs and biographies.
In their distinct and different voices, novelists and sometimes patients and physicians, try to articulate the unspeakable: depression, mental illness, cancer, addiction, tuberculosis, AIDS, Alzheimer… Expressing the need for words when the biological goes haywire, these voices resonate as a last bastion of order and memory.
Invited guests by faculty in anthropology, biology, medical ethics, psychology and sociology will supplement and enrich the course's central corpus of literature, art, photography and film.
TEXTS WILL BE CHOSEN FROM AMONG THE FOLLOWING:
Germinie Lacerteux, Goncourt
La Femme, Michelet (excerpts)
Le Bonheur dans le Crime, Barbey d’Aurevilly (short story)
La Doulou, Alphonse Daudet
La Voyeuse interdite, Nina Bouraoui.
L'Evènement, Annie Ernaux
Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit, Annie Ernaux
L'Immoraliste, André Gide
A l'Ami qui ne m'a pas sauvé la vie, Guibert
La Pianiste, film de Michael Haneke
Cléo de 5 à 7, film d'Agnès Varda
One short paper, one exposé.
Interested students will be encouraged to work on a final project, based on their particular interest, under the close supervision of the instructor.