Encountering Monsters in Comparative Literature

Catalog description

What is a monster? What happens when one encounters a monster? This literature-based seminar considers monsters in different literary traditions, including ancient epic, folktale, poetry, theory, science fiction, and cinema. Monstrous figures from different cultural traditions, places, eras, genres, and forms will guide us through various representations of monstrosity—a concept which both invites and defies definition. We will ask: What cultural and imaginative needs do monsters fill? How do monsters help us think about identity politics, and the cultural production of ideas of self and other? To what extent are monsters tools of ideological oppression, and to what extent are monsters liberatory figures that offer conceptual alternatives to systems of oppression and violence?