“A Widely Applicable Model”: Teaching Sarah Manguso’s The Two Kinds of Decay Across Institutions

Abstract

Many of those teaching at the intersection of medicine and the humanities are siloed within institutional spaces. This essay recounts the teaching of Sarah Manguso’s The Two Kinds of Decay to students across different academic contexts and considers what we can learn when we put classrooms in conversation with each other. This essay argues for the value of texts like Manguso’s, which explicitly hold the narrating subject and form of illness narrative up for critical examination. The authors call for more collaborative teaching, which has special resonance in the health humanities, where conversations already depend on bridging disciplines and listening to the stories others can tell.