Hideous Monsters of the Mind: Monster Literature, Monster Theory, and American Identities

Catalog description

What do ancient beliefs about headless men and giants have in common with rap music and free love? Strangely enough, a single word has been used to refer to each: “monster.” In this course, we examine how monsters from European literary and intellectual traditions are translated into American culture. We begin with a survey of pre-modern traditions: the “Monstrous Races” described by Pliny the Elder, the prodigies of Aristotle and Cicero, and the biological/medical tradition that was extrapolated from a hybrid reading of Hippocrates and Macrobius. After following these traditions in Medieval and Early Modern writing, the bulk of the course reads from key moments in American history where resurrected monsters policed (and infiltrated) the boundaries of emerging American notions of identity and difference: from white supremacist pseudoscience to black abolitionism, and from “freak shows” to postmodern performance art.