ENGL-200

200-A VT: American Horror
Offered Fall (Gordon)

What draws us to horror? From haunted houses to slasher films, gothic novels to teen vampire fiction, mindless zombies to maniacal psychopaths, the passion for scary stories has remained an indelible part of American culture, reflecting our anxieties back to us. This course takes a closer look at the tradition of horror in American culture, from seventeenth-century accounts of the Salem Witch Trials to twenty-first century feminist horror; classic tales by Poe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Edith Wharton to weird fiction by H. P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti; mid-century horror by Shirley Jackson and Richard Matheson, to recent masters of the form like Clive Barker, Stephen King, and Carmen Maria Machado. We'll also watch several films by directors such as John Carpenter and Jordan Peele, complementing these primary texts with theoretical readings on the nature of horror, from the eighteenth-century gothic to Freud's uncanny, "monster theory" to the "spectral turn." Finally, the course will interrogate canons of taste and art, highbrow and lowbrow, respectable "literary" fiction versus disparaged mass-market genre fiction. When you're done reading for the night, you might want to leave the light on...

200-B VT: Beast Literature|Feast Literature: Poetic Metaphors & the Human Creature
Offered Fall (Roberts VanKouwenhoven)

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection, to record the journey … to expand our world,” says Anaïs Nin. In this introductory seminar/workshop, we’ll consider a diptych of lenses (beasts/animals, feasts/food) through which literary writers come to understand human experience – finding inspiration, fuel, fodder, mirrors, symbols, models, and metaphors in relationships with food and creatures, given the prevalence and proximity of both in our lives. Following Emily Dickinson’s advice to tell it slant -- to approach truths indirectly, rather than head-on, poets often embrace elements of “feasts,” or aspects of “beasts,” as useful tools of craft and image, not only to nourish body and mind, but to provide ways to remember, to enact, to celebrate, to mourn, to comprehend what it means to be alive. Charged emotionally, culturally, spiritually, politically, etc., appearances of foods or animals can resonate with implication, offering ineffable revelations. We spend our lives amidst animals, fellow planet-dwellers, cartoon heroes, whether they’re pets or roaming wild, whether honored or pushed to extinction. Similarly, our fascination for all aspects of food arises out of need: we must eat to survive; hence, diverse memories/desires, traditions/celebrations, stories of production/preparation, even disgust/scarcity, avail themselves to poets. In this writing intensive course, we’ll read widely and deeply to learn about poems, ourselves, and each other; and we’ll have opportunities to craft our own Bestiary, and/or Feastiary.

200-C VT: X This: Generation X on America
Offered Spring (Leise)

Growing up, Gen Xers were thought to be lazy, cynical, and disengaged. Some folks defended the posture as cool detachment, instead. We'll look at some excellent US-based writers born between 1965 and 1980 to see how they view and understand the post-Cold War era and beyond. We will consider how a bemused group of chilled-out wordsmiths ultimately gave voice to a strident contemporary moment. What do the proverbial slackers in the back of the classroom have to say? Writers may include Colson Whitehead, Kathryn Davis, Ben Marcus, Jhumpa Lahiri, Sergio De La Pava, Rivka Galchen, and films such as One Battle After Another and Spider-Man into the Spider-Verse.