American Horror Stories

Catalog description

This course investigates the relationship between institutions and individuals, the general and the personal, and the normal and the monstrous in U.S. horror literature and media. How and why are so many institutions—prisons, hospitals, universities—described in terms of horror, as institutional nightmares? How do horror subgenres—Gothic fiction, body horror, psychological horror, monster stories, zombie narratives—function and what cultural work do they perform? How and to what effect are “monstrous” and “normal” figures racialized and gendered? To address these questions, we will read and view texts in a range of media with emphasis on Asian American and African American literary and cultural production from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. We’ll explore how horror is not only “about” patriarchal institutions and their fear and management of difference, but also a site of feminist critique and pleasure.