English 148. Modern Monsters in Literature and Film

Instructor: Deidre Lynch
Monday & Wednesdays 10:30-11:45 am | Location: TBD

Why study monsters?  Though modern peoples don’t fear monsters and indeed don’t even believe in them (or so we tell ourselves), monsters have nonetheless done an awfully good job of colonizing twenty-first-century popular culture. At present marauding vampires and the walking dead are everywhere (and then, too, there are the internet trolls). Our world seems to dedicate a lot of energy to exactly the fears we thought we were supposed either to have exorcised by becoming modern and disenchanted or to have exorcised simply by growing up and no longer needing to look under our beds before falling asleep at night. Why does the monstrous compel us? 

To help explain the fascination with the monster, this course looks backward, to nineteenth-century Gothic fiction and to the horror cinema that took up its mantle. The course’s premise is that by taking seriously monsters’ staying power we can learn a lot--about, for instance, the way the horror tradition has helped modernity make sense of itself. Monster stories are stories about the failures built into our systems of categorization and notions of normality. They make vivid the potential for violence in the notions of cultural purity and cultural inheritance that modernity uses to organize its accounts of identity and community. 

We’ll begin in the year 1818 with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Our next move will be to the fictions that were written in the shadow of that famous ghost-story competition that on a dark and stormy night ushered into being both Shelley’s monster and (via the poet Lord Byron and his traveling companion John Polidori) the first modern vampire.  Pursuit of this project will have us reading novels, novellas, and short stories by Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Robert Louis Stevenson, Gaston Leroux, H.G. Wells, and others. We’ll turn briefly near the end of the semester to the early horror films that gave the Gothic tradition’s recurring preoccupations with the animation of the dead a new lease on life. Bringing the story of the class up to the present, we’ll conclude the semester with some episodes of Ben Stiller’s Apple TV show Severance. 

This course satisfies the “1700-1900 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.