SERIAL HORROR

Cannibals! Orphans! Strikes! Vampires! This course asks how do horror stories employ suspense and disgust to unsettle political, social, and ethical complacency in the hearts and minds of readers and audiences? We will consider the pan-media global adaptations, translations, reiterations, and afterlives of several powerful horror stories—maritime, domestic, industrial, and supernatural-- as they serially repeat across national borders, languages, historical periods, and delivery platforms, from novels, plays, and film to an underwater sculpture, photographs, paintings, advertisements, a graphic novel, and other aesthetic forms. We will read each adaptation in synchronic dialogue with its companions, in diachronic perspective, and through relevant theoretical lenses, comparing the priorities of aesthetic form in the context of the national, cultural, and the historical contingencies of class and race difference. Texts may include the Raft of the Medusa, Jane Eyre, Mary Barton, Germinal, Dracula and the Dybbuk. Familiarity with French, Yiddish, Russian, Wolof (Atlantique), Korean (Parasite) and Persian (A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night) welcome but not required. All majors welcome!

(To count this course for the English major, all writing must focus on works originally published in English.)