123042 PS Literary Studies / Proseminar Literature (2021S)

Monsters, pock-marked faces, contagious bodies – this seminar focuses on the early modern body in a state of disorder. For early modern contemporaries, the body was inscribed with meaning, a canvas for divine communication and retribution, a surface that could be read like an open book. At the same time, the period is marked by competing attitudes towards the body, attitudes that – according to historian of Medicine Michael Stolberg – can best be described as “semantic networks”, as multi-layered collections of ideas that functioned through analogy and association rather than rigorous logic (2011, 84). Medical discourses, in the period, intersected with other discourses, including those of religion, philosophy, astronomy, and politics. Literature, too, had an important role to play in this process.

In recent decades, scholars have stressed the ubiquity of variously deformed, disabled or diseased bodies in the literature of the time. They have shed light on representations of the body in different genres, the use of disease or deformity as means of characterisation, as trope, metaphor, or symbol of larger social issues. They have also commented on its function as a plot catalyst.

In this seminar, we will explore how early modern doctors, churchmen, lay people, and literary authors tried to make sense of the body and its functioning. As we will see, literature could reflect and reaffirm normative social constructs, but it also had the power to challenge and deconstruct them. We will read a number of canonical and lesser-known works from the latter part of the early modern period and look at the ways authors imagined bodies in health, deformity, and illness. We will familiarise ourselves with historical contexts and early modern discourses of the body, disease, and deformity, and read these alongside literary texts.

Together, we will reflect on the body in sickness and in health. To that end, we will read a number of theoretical texts that help us think critically about the body and complicate our own notions of the body, of disease, and disability. We will also briefly revise the basics of academic writing.
At the end of this seminar, you should be able to:
- read, summarise, and contextualise a number of early modern literary texts of different genres
- give an account of early modern attitudes towards the body in sickness and in health and of related discourses, name relevant thinkers, and explain their main ideas
- plan and write an academic paper about one of the discussed texts (or a related topic)
- find and use secondary literature that can help you understand early modern literary texts
- read a number of theories about the body, summarise their main points, contrast and relate them to each other