ENGL 52.22 The Last Man: Race, Empire, Disease
What do race and empire have to do with disease? We may have intuitive answers, especially about how xenophobia, anti-Asian racism, and anti-Black policies in the US impacted the spread and severity of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this course we’ll encounter the weird and wild literary-historical foundations that will help us explore and support our intuitions. This class is centered around a deep and careful reading of Mary Shelley’s apocalypse novel The Last Man, in which a world-destroying plague emerges, serpent headed, from the shores of the Nile, and wends its way through Asia and eventually to Europe. Together we will think about how this book reflects and shapes ideas about race and disease in the age of empire, and how these ideas resonate in the present—including how we have lived through, explained, and understood the pandemic. We will punctuate our reading of Shelley with very recent literature by a diverse slate of authors, including Ling Ma’s New York pandemic thriller Severance, Ilya Kaminsky’s long poem of disability subterfuge Deaf Republic, and Colson Whitehead’s putatively “postracial” zombie novel Zone One. Mid-quarter, we’ll also do a zombie/pandemic/apocalypse film fest with panel discussions. Main questions will include how stories determine actual outcomes of natural phenomena like disease; the shift from a Romantic to a Victorian sense of self and social connection; contagion as a material and discursive phenomenon; and the roles of labor, class, and global trade in the creation of modern epidemiology. This course may be particularly interesting to pre-medical students.
Department-Specific Course Categories
English and Creative Writing