The course title is intended to signal three stains of inquiry that we will pursue this quarter, each of which pays particular attention to how monsters are defined, the historical conditions in which these figurations or definitions of monstrosity emerge and their legacies. We will begin our investigation in the 19th century focusing on Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein and Stephen Crane’s “The Monster” as symptomatic of texts that in defining the monster as unnatural and inhuman figure what counts as personhood and, by extension, citizenship, along with the rights and value that attend it. On the one hand, these texts promulgate then hegemonic understandings about race, gender, class, and sexuality which orchestrate what Michel Foucault defines as “state racism”: namely a biopolitical regime that subdivides humanity into “we, the people” whose well being the state is pledged to foster and the less than human whose lives are marketable, disposable, or menacing. On the other hand, the same texts offer a counter vision, that upends this binary and the values that it assigns. A second, late 20th century strain heralds what Donna Haraway calls “the promise of monsters”; we’ll examine what that promise might signal for better and worse in a critically contextualized reading of Octavia Butler’s Dawn. A third, 21st century strain augurs the domestication of monsters. As a case in point, and with an eye to recent social issues (eg. ,color blindness and gay marriage) we will examine the construction of “hot” boy vampires and the girls who” love” them in the Twilight series. We’ll engage this issue of domestication with careful attention to one film—probably the last—as a focal point for discussion of the series and it’s relationship to the literature on monstrosity that we have read.