MAHAGONNY Brecht/Weill/Weinstein

Rash Reading: Rethinking Virginia Woolf's On Being Ill

“…92 Literature, he writes, "cannot be cleansed of its ambiguities, its excesses, its metaconsciousness as a verbal artifact, its incessant trafficking in fantasy, desire, fear, folklore, myth, and the like," no matter how transparent it at first appears. 93 As such, he concludes, for literature to have any real value in the medical classroom, teachers and students must resist the impulse towards simplification, and instead learn to treat "the text as endowed with the same richness, indeterminacy, and dignity that we (should and must) take for granted in human beings, especially in their relations to their bodies." 94 Cognizant of the exigencies of teaching literature within a medical curriculum, more recent critiques home in on the methodological issues that Weinstein alludes to, and in doing so develop insightful and productive alternatives to the pedagogical model he describesa particularly good example being Catherine Belling's discussion of teaching Margaret Edson's play Wit alongside more conventional medical texts.…”