ENG 254 - Monstrosity in Literature & Film

Course unit(s): 1
Meets GAR: Meets general academic requirement HU.
Grotesque, terrifying, seductive, violent, or uncanny, monsters occupy a significant place in the literary tradition. Why do monsters have such lasting popular appeal in literary and filmic narratives? As emblems of horror and repulsion forced to live in the borders—of physical, biological, racial, economic, political, and sexual difference—the monsters that haunt the pages of literature and our cultural imaginations, who constantly threaten the norm with invasion and contamination, highlight the social values and fears of a given time and culture. In this course, we will explore literature and film in which monsters represent changing social ideas about such things as nationalism, empire, class, race, gender roles, and religion. We will consider how a monster embodies a multiplicity of psychic and social fears. What do these monsters portend and/or reveal about the cultures from which they arise or are exiled? We will begin by reading short texts in which monsters dwell in order to foreground a series of foundational questions about monstrosity. What does it mean to be “monstrous”? Where are the borders between human and monster? Who labels whom “monstrous” and why? What are the ethical stakes in confronting the monster? We will then turn our attention to how monsters reflect or challenge what constitutes the “human” through classic monster texts, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and films that grapple with similar questions via dinosaurs, vampires, and zombies: Jurassic Park, Let the Right One In, and Dawn of the Dead. We will then ask what we might learn from the hybridized literary and cinematic monsters of the twentieth century, examining their representation in Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, J.M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country, King Kong, and The Host. Throughout the semester, we’ll think and write critically about why every culture generates its own monsters, and what ramifications monster-making and our reactions to monstrosity have had in the real world. Satisfies the Departmental Prose, Drama/Transmedia, and Social Justice Requirements.