Fables of Modernity: Vampires, Monsters, Madness

Catalog description

This lecture course focuses on four books that continue to vibrate in the cultural imagination today because, in addition to being fascinating literary works, they are touchstone books that explore or even create social narratives of what modernity means, and how its vast changes alter the ways people live their livespolitically, philosophically, scientifically, psychologically in terms of social identity and self-image, and ethically, religiously, and spiritually too. From the late eighteenth century to the twentieth century, and now in the twenty-first underway, modernity exploded on the world stage, sometimes quite literally.