Special Themes in Literature: Monstrous, Horrible, and Weird Literature

For centuries, figures of horror have been deployed as vehicles for negotiating both cultural anxieties and cultural ideals—often concerning contested concepts such as race, gender, and “progress.”  In this class, we will examine a variety of texts that contain generic or stylistic elements of terror to see how writers tackle social concerns through common tropes.  Throughout the semester, we will consume different “horrible” texts across centuries—considering the monsters of Beowulf, R. L. Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and the titular entity of H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulu” among others—to interrogate various depictions of both terror generally and monsters specifically: their recurring themes and how they change (or stay the same) between historical periods and genres.  We will also consider key questions related to horror literature, such as “How does terror in literature work to express individual or national anxieties?” and “How and where do we see resonances of past horror writing in the 21st century?” to think about the importance of horror as a broad literary and historical genre.