Close Reading: Giving and Receiving Accounts of Self, Columbia University

Narrative competence is a crucial dimension of health-care delivery, the capacity to attend and respond to stories of illness, and the narrative skills to reflect critically on the scene of care. Narrative Medicine explores and builds the clinical applications of literary knowledge. How are illnesses emplotted? Does suffering belong to a genre? Can a medical history be co-narrated in order to redistribute ownership and authority? The objectives of this Core course include furthering close reading skills, and exploring theories of self-telling and relationality. How do we give and receive accounts of self? What are the implications for our understanding of the clinical encounter? In examining the complexities of this exchange we will turn to narrative theory, performance theory, autobiographical theory, psychoanalytic theory, and the nexus of narrative and identity. Readings will include works by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Maggie Nelson, Toni Morrison, W.G. Sebald, Kazuo Ishiguro, Judith Butler, Jonathan Shay and others, and an assortment of readings in narrative theory, trauma scholarship and witnessing literature. The Witnessing assignment will take place in a clinical setting, where students will each have the opportunity to function as witness, observing and representing what occurs in the office or on rounds as a way to help both patient and doctor to take full measure of what they do together. The in-class Workshop portion of the class is designed to offer experience with writing to a prompt and responding to others’ writing, and to help prepare students for the Practicum (should they choose to take it) by offering the opportunity to craft prompts and to act as facilitator of the group. This course contributes to the Master of Science in Narrative Medicine Program. This information has been collected for the Post-Discipline Online Syllabus Database. The database explores the use of literature by schools of professional education in North America. It forms part of a larger project titled Post-Discipline: Literature, Professionalism, and the Crisis of the Humanities, led by Dr Merve Emre with the assistance of Dr Hayley G. Toth. You can find more information about the project at https://postdiscipline.english.ox.ac.uk/. Data was collected and accurate in 2021/22.