230335 “The Devil’s Cold.” (Mental) Illnesses and Disabilities as Cultural Narratives (S) (WiSe 2023/2024)

Openness about illnesses are on the rise. Theories and methodologies of disabilities and (mental) illnesses are created more and more. The representation of illness is no longer a character trait, a metaphor, chiefly analyzed as a means of giving voice and/or to rebel against sociocultural and political systems that thematize, stigmatize, marginalize as a general interpretation. Instead, through a long history of disability activism, the advent of the 1990 ADA (Americans with Disability Act) and critical disability studies scholars, reading pieces of life writing, novels, poems, multimedia texts through the lens of disability and (mental) illness, it challenges us to rethink the marginalization of people with disabilities as a "critical category" (Hall 4) put into an intersectional approach and dialogue with gender, queer, critical race and postcolonial studies.
Now, with this in mind, we will start this class with familiarizing ourselves with theories of (Cultural) Disability Studies, identity, and the narration of illnesses. We will then engage in a dialogue with selected 21st century literary and multimedia texts from the U.S. Canada and the Caribbean, which we read as cultural representations of disabilities and illnesses.

Hall, Alice. Literature and Disability. Routledge, 2016.