Literature, Medicine & Technology

Contemporary biomedical technologies have delivered an unprecedented ability to refashion our bodies and by extension the social institutions in which bodies circulate and become meaningful. But these technologies have also wrought unexpected changes in social and cultural institutions like the family and the novel. And the novel has always responded to technological change in its preoccupation with revolutions, industrial and digital, while also becoming an object of those changes as the printing press gives way to digital ways of reading, producing and structuring texts. Technology has broadened medicine’s involvement in everyday life and new literary genres like the neuro-novel and the illness memoir have risen in response. By reading technological change in terms of health and illness, family structures and literary innovation, we will engage with the medical, cultural and representational meanings developed by many of these new technologies. Readings will include but not be limited to novels and memoirs by Shelley Jackson, Lucy Grealy, Maggie Nelson, Kazuo Ishiguro and Tom McCarthy.