Imagining the Other: Death, Bereavement and Loss

• Credit value: 15 credits at Level 6
• Convenors: Professor Fintan Walsh (Birkbeck), Professor Annie Bartlett (SGUL)
• Tutors: Hannah Reeves (Birkbeck), Professor Annie Bartlett (SGUL) and guest speakers
• Assessment: a 1000-1500-word reflective writing piece (0%) and 3000-word essay (100%)

Loss, death and bereavement are three of the most extreme and difficult experiences anyone faces. For doctors and other health and social care workers these complex phenomena must be confronted on an almost daily basis. This has seldom been more true than in 2020 when the Covid 19 pandemic asked so much of health and social care workers worldwide and left many people personally bereaved.

• How does it feel to face your own death, and what drives people to chronicle this experience in writing?
• What can reading such works tell us about the human urge to communicate, and to leave a record of oneself behind?
• For those facing the loss of a loved one, how can life go on after death, and can anything positive emerge from this?
• Can there be humour in death, and how and why does loss sometimes lead to renewed creativity?

In this module, as well as loss and bereavement around death we will consider other kinds of loss.

• How do those diagnosed with chronic illness cope with losing part of their former identity?
• What is the mourning process for someone who has lost a limb, a sense, or the ability to form memory?

We will use textual representations of loss, death and bereavement to explore these key issues, examining how far reading literature can help us understand the experiences of others. You will be able to choose from a broad range of literary texts on these themes, complemented by consideration of other art forms, and will compare these to carefully chosen and accessible examples of clinical literature and practice.

Indicative syllabus

• Death and bereavement: an introduction
• The process of dying
• Death as a rite of passage
• Doctors and death
• Pandemics and the differences they make
• Loss and recovery

By the end of this module, you will:

• have a complex understanding of experiences of loss, death and bereavement
• understand the multifaceted nature of recovery following personal experience of illness, loss, bereavement or death of a loved one
• be able to undertake a critical appraisal of literary texts to consider the representation of different kinds of loss, death and bereavement in literature
• understand the lived experience of patients, carers and relatives as they negotiate multiple kinds of loss, bereavement and death.