This class is intended as a research seminar in the private experience of the body and the public culture of science, medicine, and literature. The purpose is to bring together graduate students from the departments of English and History in an interdisciplinary examination of the ways in which new scientific and medical approaches to the body intersected with literary versions of human embodiment. Each week students will be asked to read selected literary texts in conjunction with scientific, medical, or other historical materials. We hope students will learn something about the 'other' discipline and its methodologies.
Similar contradictions mark recent discussions.
The seminar will look at representations of conscience as a theoretical concept and as a lived experience in theological and political texts as well as a variety of literary genres. Term 2 Topics in Literary and Cultural History. Such concerns mark important common ground between traditional studies of English literary history, and contemporary approaches in which notions of territory and belonging are vigorously contested. In this course we will explore these themes by concentrating on the literary history of the county of Kent, from the early modern period to the twentieth century. These features, and others, create a literary and cultural landscape fractured along lines of gender and class, and between egalitarian and elitist ideologies.