“Because it deals with pain”: Literature and Therapy

Literature, reading and writing can have a therapeutic effect on us: In bibliotherapeutic practice, therapists make use of books, novels and poetry to improve a client's mental health. Conversely, therapeutic knowledge can also be a useful tool to get to know a text, e.g. to understand a novel’s character dynamics, or a poem’s strategies of relating to the reader. Bearing these observations in mind, in this class we will discuss a variety of different texts using 'therapeutic' approaches (e.g. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Contextual Family Therapy) to understand textual family dynamics, characters’ strategies of dealing with the past, their processes of decision-making and so on.

Please purchase Angela Flournoy’s novel The Turner House (2015). A reader with additional material will be made available at the start of the semester.