Medieval cannibals, botched science experiments, gothic vampires, human-animal hybrids, beasts, demons, and freaks of all kinds: this course explores our continued fascination with the monstrous in literature, film, and art. Monsters are born out of cultural necessity, out of the desire to explore perversion, as an embodiment of popular fears and fantasies, as a practice of representing the unknown and of sublimating deep-seated anxieties of contamination and invasion. Monsters are both the cause and effect of a crisis, and they tend to trouble simple binary divisions like self/other, man/woman, us/them, good/evil. We will explore questions of gender, genre, race, capitalism, terror, cuteness, sexuality, disease, difference, and the boundaries of the human. This class will allow you to develop your own theory of monstrosity; provide you with a conceptual vocabulary to analyze films and literature; introduce you to the relationship between histories of monstrosity in the West and political analysis; and help you develop your writing skills via short assignments, peer review, and revision.
- Instructor of record: Shoshana Adler