Feeling Bad in Contemporary Literature

While statistics tell us that life is steadily getting better, many experience the contemporary through a kind of malaise, or in other words, feeling bad. This course examines how key sites of negative affect in today’s culture—illness, trauma and death—shape our understanding of feeling as a collective event. By focusing on a range of contemporary texts ranging across memoir, fiction, poetry and film, and from children’s media to reflections on old age, this course will explore how these texts conceive of negativity in ways that are exuberant, poignant, and audacious. Using critical insights and methodologies from affect theory, death studies, psychology and the medical humanities, we will investigate how negativity, often perceived as isolating or individualistic, can be a site for renewal, social connection, and increased self-knowledge. In so doing, we will ask questions like, what do these encounters with life’s limits tell us about how we conceive of our own lives? How do contemporary texts respond to historical traditions, theories and attitudes towards negativity and negative affect? And, can literature help us see that feeling bad can show us what’s good about living?