Pushing Up against Too Much: Reading, Writing, and Witnessing Illness in the First-Year Seminar

Abstract

Nearly a decade ago, I taught a first-year seminar at Adelphi University that remains simultaneously my most challenging and my most rewarding teaching experience, both personally and professionally. I designed “Illness as Narrative: Bearing Witness to Cancer and AIDS” around an ambitious reading schedule, fusing trauma theory and concepts from disabilities studies with stories of illness. Although I have considered offering a version of this course at my current university, and I frequently teach many of the texts and theories in smaller doses within a semester, this intensive twiceweekly seminar required a uniquely high level of emotional stamina from the very start. On the first day, I asked the students why they had selected our class out of the dozens of options open to them. This is what I heard: “My aunt had breast cancer.” “My mother is a breast cancer survivor.” “I have cancer in my family.” “My dad has cancer.” “I was an HIV/AIDS peer educator in high school.” “My uncle died of cancer.” “My grandfather died of AIDS.” “My mother recovered from breast cancer.” “I work with an AIDS organization.” “My grandmother had cancer.” “So did mine.” “I am a cancer survivor.” “I have cancer in my family.” Days into the semester, students told bits of their stories of illness and disability, expanding both beyond the family circle and beyond cancer and AIDS: stories of friends who had serious physical disabilities, of a community allowing itself to forget a young man dead of AIDS, of a student living in fear of her family’s history of heart disease, of another student’s battle with anorexia. Over the course of our time together, the onslaught of pain and loss did not subside: that fall, one student lost a close friend, another’s grandmother died, yet another’s father was losing ground to his cancer. And days after the semester ended, one student went home to Florida to learn his mother had just been diagnosed with cervical cancer.