This course will introduce you to the practice of reading literature. Although we’ll read texts that span a time period of a century and a half, and although we’ll address a variety of cultural forms, the texts that we’ll explore share preoccupations that will allow us to put them into conversation. Specifically, this course will treat texts within which monsters and monstrosities abound.

As we work to develop our close reading skills, we will learn to read a variety of cultural forms in relation to their particular social and historical context, not as artifacts, but as full participants in the making and meaning of that context called modernity. What’s modernity? This course will acquaint you with some of the central historical developments that have conventionally been cited in answer to this question, even as the focus will be on literary mediations of these developments. The transition from a feudal economy to capitalist relations of production, the rise of the nation-state and the public sphere, the proliferation of innovations in science and technology - these are just a few of the defining historical characteristics of “modernization” that our literary archive will address. Modernity is a monster of a concept. There are additional reasons for pairing monsters and modernity within a single course theme, however. To begin, the processes of modernization sketched above have had their monstrous manifestations: relationships of domination and subordination, methods of exploitation and expropriation, and histories of violence. Furthermore, these historical developments have often unleashed what have been felt to be monstrous changes in the experience of everyday life. Finally, new identities and social practices have emerged within modernity that you may find as fortunate as frightening, but that nonetheless haunt institutions of power. These are just a few of the monsters and monstrosities of modernity that we’ll explore through reading monsters in literature and culture.

This course meets the university “W” requirement, which means students will produce 10-15 pages of graded, out of class writing. The most likely form this writing will take would be two 5-7 page papers. Additional class assignments may include informal response writing, quizzes, group presentations, etc. This course will also entail a hefty, if enjoyable, amount of reading. The literary forms that we’ll address include: fiction; poetry; and literary non-fiction, in particular, the slave narrative. We’ll also discuss how we might treat film, manifestos, and even theoretical essays as literary forms: James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein and/or other film adaptations of Shelley’s Frankenstein; Marx’s “The Communist Manifesto”; and Freud’s “The ‘Uncanny’” are possible selections of additional texts that evidence how form informs content. The poetry we’ll read will most likely include nineteenth and early twentieth poets such as Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, A. C. Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, and T. S. Eliot. Poetry will be included in your coursepack, in addition to shorter prose works. The longer prose works that you will have to purchase will most likely include: