Dementia Narratives, Columbia University

This course takes a short, intensive dive into the narratives that story our experience of and with dementia. “Dementia Narratives” will use the literary genres of film, fiction, memoir, and graphic novels to excavate dementia stories using three framing tools. First, we will consider the relationship between the storyteller and the person with dementia, and the positioning of the person with dementia in the context of the story. Second, we will attend to these stories as they are framed by metaphors. And third, as we attend to these narratives we will also connect them to implications for practice and policy. In Narrative Medicine we focus on story and its importance in understanding the experience of illness for the individual, for the family or community, and for society. In this course we explore the elephant in that room: the importance of the illness experiences that cannot be narrated. Can we use the skills we gain in close reading and reflective writing to better understand the relationship between memory and self, when memory is inconsistent, free-floating, and riddled with holes? The purpose of this exploration is to better serve the needs of those whose stories do not fit the expected arcs of coherence, to understand the world of the caregivers for those with dementia, and to consider how narrative and policy inform each other in this growing arena of societal need. These questions and topics hover at the edges of current courses such as “Illness/Disability Narratives,” but are generally not directly addressed. 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.