This course is about the intersection of illness with literature. We explore how literature reimagines personal experiences of sickness beyond the medical, and we draw on what we learn to reflect upon the role of medical power in daily life. We read literature that imagines disease, cure, and convalescence as gendered modes. We ask how literature exposes pathologization and how authors rewrite illness beyond pathology. We think about the relationship between the regulations imposed by cultural and social understandings of “sickness” and the resistance posed by authors to medicalization.