Loss of Taste and Smell: A University-Level Writing Course

30 April - 04 June 2021

Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.

Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor

Covid-19, whether we have actually had it or not, has made us acutely aware of the proximity of “that other place” and hypervigilant of our and other bodies and their symptoms. How can we tell whether or not we have lost our taste or smell? What exactly is a dry cough? And for those of us who have had Covid-19, what has it meant to identify as citizens of the kingdom of the sick?

In this university-level writing course, your instructors Oya Christie-Miller and Olivia Heal will guide you through a series of texts - literary and theoretical - about ailments physical and mental, real and imaginary, and help you to become better academic writers before starting university in the fall. As readers of illness, we will be not just sufferers, but also doctors, pathologists and psychiatrists. Like surgeons, we will excise, examine and diagnose individual parts of the text. We will analyze patient histories and draw conclusions. 

We will begin the course with doctor's daughter Eula Biss, whose diagnosis-defying pain makes her consider the nexus between medicine, mathematics and language. Deborah Levy takes us to Southern Spain, where a limping mother and her daughter seek to be healed by the hands of Dr. Gomez for €25,000. Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer declare their most famous hysteria patient Anna O., aged 21, cured thanks to the discipline they have just invented: psychoanalysis. But is she cured? And have they invented psychoanalysis or was it Anna O. who did? Thomas Mann’s protagonist Aschenbach is so enthralled by forbidden love that he fails to realise Venice is gripped by a deadly epidemic. In the first episode of the Walking Dead, Sheriff Deputy Rick Grimes wakes up from a coma to a post-pandemic world where the dead don’t die. Anothony Doerr’s Shell Collector, blind, alone and emotionally detached, is paralyzed by a cone shell and discovers the beauty of feeling. 

This is a course that is designed to prepare you for university-level academic writing. We will help you develop your writing skills through a series of short exercises, brainstorming assignments, in-class workshops, peer reviews, and revisions. 

Audience: High School Seniors and UNIVERSITY Students

The class meets from 3-4.20pm BST (7-8.20am PDT/10-11.20am EDT/5-6.20pm Turkey) on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Each student will also be assigned to one of the instructors (Oya or Olivia) for 30-minute one-on-one tutorials, which will also take place on Fridays, and will be scheduled with each student individually.

See the syllabus for more details.