LIT 81H Literature and Pandemic: The World at the End of the World

Surveys some of the most famous accounts and representations of historical and fictional pandemics in the history of literature, mostly from the Western tradition. Students read excerpts from works by Thucydides, Lucretius, Boccaccio, Manzoni, Poe, Camus, London, and Elkhadem. Conversation centers on the question of how Western literature have attempted to both document and investigate the destruction of human society, but also to recreate it.