In “Critical Reading, Writing, and Inquiry: Teaching Sylvia Plath throughout the Curriculum,” Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick argues that if our teaching objectives include developing our students’ critical reading, writing, and inquiry skills, then we can mine Plath’s prose and poetry to teach and hone those, and, while doing so, we can engage with feminist texts that provide forays into thinking and writing about diversity, equity, and inclusion. To this end, this paper will examine how Plath’s prose and her poems can be incorporated into a 100-level writing course that cultivates critical reading, writing, and inquiry. Plath’s novel The Bell Jar (1963) is a class favorite in upper-division undergraduate courses informed by Universal Design for Learning principles. In senior-level and capstone courses, Goodspeed-Chadwick’s students delve deeply into issues related to feminism and representations of trauma, and they leave the courses with artifacts that showcase their learning: photo essays, research papers, e-Portfolios, community-wide presentations, photographs of exhibitions, and conference posters/papers/presentations on local, national, and international stages.
Gary Leising’s paper, “‘Properly Jointed[?]”: Reflections on Building a Sylvia Plath Syllabus,” focuses on teaching the joy and sorrow of Plath’s poetry. Students in Leising’s Plath course consider the breadth of Plath’s oeuvre, reading her poems in Ted Hughes’s edition of Ariel (1965) and in her own order in Ariel: The Restored Edition. The latter points to joy in the volume’s concluding line: “The bees are flying. They taste the spring.” Students now have access to a welcome abundance of Plath scholarship, from her Unabridged Journals to the two volumes of her letters to Heather Clark’s comprehensive biography, Red Comet. Leising will discuss organizing a Plath syllabus to show that neither single narrative—joy or sorrow—can contain or adequately describe her life or work. Plath asked if she could ever entirely put together her father in her poem “The Colossus,” here Leising asks the same about her.
In “Forgetting about ECT: Electroshock in Plath and Popular Culture,” Elizabeth J. Donaldson argues that despite Sylvia Plath’s iconic association with mental illness and the overwhelming body of scholarship that interprets her work through her psychiatric history and diagnoses, disability studies approaches to Plath’s work are relatively new and underexplored. In this paper, Donaldson uses Plath’s experiences with ECT (electroshock therapy) and contemporary archival sources to examine the relative silence surrounding this treatment in U.S. culture and the forces—including antipsychiatry, stigma, and the totalizing narratives of Michel Foucault—that reinforce that silence in humanities classrooms and research. Donaldson seeks new ways of talking about mental health care that center lived experiences, and she reexamines the politics of experience from a post-Laingian critical disability studies perspective.
Anna Mukamal’s presentation, “Mediating the Art of Mental Illness: Confessional Poetry and Contemporary Painting,” situates the serial self-portraiture of contemporary painter Josephine King (b. 1965), which thematizes her embodied experience of mental illness, within a lineage of confessional poetry. Mukamal compares the relationship between “the (mentally ill) self” and “the work” in both King and Plath, both as the artists imagine that relationship and/versus how audiences “read” it. Both Plath’s and King’s "visual-textual dialectics"—their movement between concrete text and conjured image—offer political-aesthetic strategies for embodying and self-reflexively critiquing the ambivalent nexus of therapy and art. Writing about and teaching this work in the context of literary history, disability studies, and the digital humanities, Mukamal closes by meditating on how the (digital) archive complicates access and reception, in particular, how she has taught King’s and Plath's work together in three contexts: an upper-level seminar on “Mental Health and Literature” at Stanford University; a guest lecture on the ethics of suicide in a “Disability and Technology” course also at Stanford; and in a unit on art as activism in her “Digital Resources in the Humanities” course in the program in Digital Culture and Design at Coastal Carolina University.