ENGL 288 Modern British Literary Traditions

Monsters and Monstrosity: Literature is rife with portraits of monsters and monstrosity. From Homer's The Odyssey and Grimm's fairytales to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Salman Rushdie's Shame monsters challenge our everyday ideas about normality. Situated between the animal and the human monstrous creatures are ciphers for difference that force us to consider what we regard as culturally abject or grotesque as well as alluring. That these mythical figures continue to fascinate even as they frighten suggests their symbolic power in embodying both our latent desires and prohibitions. This course will explore the emergence of the monstrous aesthetic across several genres (epic drama novel poetry film) and periods (renaissance to contemporary) to probe the shifting terrains of sexual racial and cultural otherness that monsters represent. Along the way we will ask critical questions that arise from the study of monstrosity. What for instance separates monsters from humans? How does monstrosity define our notions about beauty and ugliness desire and disgust? Does the monster appear each time under a different guise? If so to what extent does it reshape our sensibility about what is socially abnormal? What can monsters teach us about the hopes and apprehensions of the cultures and times to which they belong? Ultimately we will seek to understand how and why these ferocious figures also elicit sympathy in us toward those markedly unlike ourselves. Our reading list includes works by Alfred Tennyson William Blake R.L. Stevenson Mary Shelley Patricia Highsmith among others.