This course examines the figure and experience of the body in literature and critical thought. How is bodily life—the experience of having a body, the pain and pleasure of having a body, its exigencies and impossibilities—given shape in literary text? How do different literary forms and genres represent the body, and in what way might genre itself be considered a bodily question? We will consider how the body is theorized by such fields as psychoanalysis, queer theory, Afropessimism, and medical humanities, and will explore both how are such matters as sexuality, illness, race, and gender are given shape within literary texts, and how they are accounted for by different theoretical bodies of thought. Texts may include those by Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva, Franz Kafka, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Toni Morrison, Paul Preciado, Frank Wilderson III, Judith Butler, Virginia Woolf, Frantz Fanon, Jacques Lacan, Charles Dickens, and Michel Foucault.