CSP 64 Monsters: 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. What would be the point of studying "monsters" in literature and film if the books and movies exist only to allow us to escape reality? This course will begin by rejecting these assumptions. By looking at the history of the concept of the monster and by looking at those particular modern monsters, such as Frankenstein's monster and Dracula, we can see the ways in which anxieties about the purity and impurity of race and nation, about who belongs and who doesn't belong to a community, about those who cannot or will not assimilate and thus threaten the body in which they have no place are explored in greater detail than anywhere else. We will ask why race is foregrounded in the contemporary zombie film (a genre which 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.

In addition to novels and films, we will read Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Foucault and Agamben.