CSP 3 Monsters in Novel and Film: Imagining Race, Nation and Class

We often think of popular culture as a kind of distraction; we watch films or read novels to escape the real world and its problems. If this were the case, there would be no point in studying monsters in literature and film. This course will begin by rejecting these assumptions. When we examine the history of the idea of the monster and look closely at particular modern monsters, such as Frankenstein's monster and Dracula, we can see that the horror they inspire concerns certain social and political anxieties: 1) anxieties about the purity and impurity of race, nation, and culture; 2) anxieties about who, within a community, belongs and doesn't belong (and how this belonging is defined); 3) anxieties about those who appear unable or unwilling to assimilate and are defined as a threat to the body in which they have no place. Novels and film dramatize these anxieties in ways that allow us to understand both how they arise and the terrible consequences to which they have often led. Finally, we will ask why race is foregrounded in the contemporary zombie film (a genre that has its origins in the former slave colony of Haiti) and what reality is captured in one its most important conventions, the "necessary" killing of children. We may discover that these forms of popular culture reveal what is most disturbing and dangerous about the societies that produce them, not least our own.