In recent years, however, more attention has been paid to the social-emotional value of fiction. In this paper, we will think about how reading stories about illness, physical and mental, impacts the reader’s well-being and society. Specifically, we will be considering how fiction about illness has the power to teach us about human relationships and empathy, benefitting us on both a personal and social level. While reading literature can broaden our perspectives and help us to become more empathetic, it also invites us to use that newfound empathy to improve, evaluate, and reconsider our interpersonal relationships.
You are writing this essay in the context of our third unit of the class: being physically down. Here, we will consider representations of illness and why authors use them. Remember: making a character sick is an authorial decision; characters are unhealthy for a reason. Often illness is used to highlight personal struggle or adversity, but it can also be used as a metaphor for self and society or a means to forge a sense of empathy in its readers. Go over the Sway about how/why authors mobilize illness to familiar yourself with these ideas. You will be looking at how illness functions in the story; that is, you will explore how the author uses it to make a point. You will also explore how the illness is used to create a sense of empathy in the reader, too. In other words, what I am asking you to do is think about how/why the author uses illness and if it works both personally and on a large scale.
You will select a short story from the list below and compose a research paper that answers the following questions: Why does the author make a specific character sick? How does the author mobilize illness to create a sense of empathy in the reader (or not)? Does it work?
In this assignment, you will take the ideas you’ve developed from reading and your research to make a claim about empathy in your selected short story. Your essay should be a well- written, researched response to “How does the representation of illness contribute to the reader’s sense of empathy?” There is a Writing Guide that takes you, paragraph-by-paragraph, through what you are supposed to do.
A sample essay is also available.
Short stories with which you may work:
• “The Last Leaf”
• “The Black Cat”
• “The Yellow Wallpaper”
• “By Degrees and Dilatory Time”
• “Open Window”
• “Snows of Kilimanjaro”
