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Convalescence: Sickness, Society, and Resignation

  • All levels
  • 21 and older
  • $335
  • Online Classroom
  • 12 hours over 4 sessions

Start Dates (0)

  • $335
  • Online Classroom
  • 12 hours over 4 sessions
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Class Description

Description

What you'll learn in this lecture class:

In a world that is itself sick—with the irascible demands of production that continuously propagate new forms of exploitation—and that in turn sickens its inhabitants, what kind of response is retreat? In Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, a young scion of the bourgeoisie undergoes an unexpectedly protracted rest cure in a cloistered Swiss sanitorium, while the outside world is igniting for war. In Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk, nearly a century later, against a background of economic collapse, mass unemployment, and political upheaval, a forlornly underemployed daughter brings her inexplicably ailing mother for treatment at an isolated clinic in southern Spain. And in Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, set in a vacuous and narcissistic New York City at the end of history, a deeply dissociated and over-privileged young woman withdraws into a scrupulously planned, pharmaceutically-induced coma, in the hopes of emerging otherwise. How might fables of retreat like these—savage, parodic, melancholic, diagnostic—help us think through not just the ailing world but our individual ways of being and acting in it? Does turning away from the world nevertheless implicate us in it?

In this course, we will read these three novels as a way of exploring questions about the world and the individual’s responsibility towards it. What is civilizational sickness, and what kind of ailment does the psychosomatic symptom point to? What is the value and ostensible purpose of medical institutionalization—isolating the ill from the wider world? What is the relationship between privilege and retreat? And to what extent can we read these novels allegorically—as fables of the choices provided for women, either to “lean in” or go to sleep; as microcosms of larger social worlds, where types and attitudes are caricatured or concentrated; as crucibles where action and alternatives may be critically explored precisely because they are in a state of suspension? Secondary readings may include texts by Henry David Thoreau, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno.

Remote Learning

This course is available for "remote" learning and will be available to anyone with access to an internet device with a microphone (this includes most models of computers, tablets). Classes will take place with a "Live" instructor at the date/times listed below.

Upon registration, the instructor will send along additional information about how to log-on and participate in the class.

Refund Policy

  • Upon request, we will refund less 5% cancellation fee of a course up until 6 business days before its start date.
  • Students who withdraw after that point but before the first class are entitled to 75% refund or full course credit.
  • After the first class: 50% refund or 75% course credit.
  • No refunds or credits will be given after the second class.

In any event where a customer wants to cancel their enrollment and is eligible for a full refund, a 5% processing fee will be deducted from the refund amount.

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Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research was established in 2011 in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. Its mission is to extend liberal arts education and research far beyond the borders of the traditional university, supporting community education needs and opening up new possibilities for scholarship in the...

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Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

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