Middlebury

ENGL 0263

American Psycho

American Psycho: Disease, Doctors, and Discontents
What constitutes a pathological response to the pressures of modernity? How do pathological protagonists drive readers toward the precariousness of their own physical and mental health? The readings for this class center on the provisional nature of sanity and the challenges to bodily health in a world of modern commerce, media, and medical diagnoses. We will begin with 19th century texts and their engagement with seemingly "diseased" responses to urbanization, new forms of work, and new structures of the family and end with contemporary fictional psychopaths engaged in attacks on the world of images we inhabit in the present. Nineteenth century texts will likely include stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Later 20th-century works will likely include Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs, Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted, and Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho. (Formerly ENAM 0263)
Subject:
English
Department:
English
Division:
Literature
Requirements Fulfilled:
AMR LIT
Equivalent Courses:
ENAM 0263
AMST 0263

Sections in Spring 2024

Spring 2024

ENGL0263A-S24 Lecture (Newbury)