Popular Fiction

Catalog description

This course will survey a selection of major genres (and subgenres) of Popular Fiction since the nineteenth century: crime, romance, western, horror, and young adult. While the serious study of popular fiction is now well-established, popular fiction is sometimes still disparaged by critics, scholars, and readers themselves {who among us hasn't tried to hide the cover of "50 Shades of Gray" on the subway?). Yet even if not always taken seriously, popular fiction is "read", and at greater rates than "serious" literary fiction. This course assumes that popular fiction is an important and meaningful literary genre, and will encourage student readers to begin to ask important questions about the cultural work performed by the books they read (especially the books they read, they think , solely for "pleasure"). Questions motivating our study of these pleasurable and readable literary genres include: what makes a genre "popular"? What do readers get out of popular fiction? Why has (and is) popular fiction been so often dismissed as "unserious"? Are there meaningful differences between "popular" and "literary" genres of fiction? What cultural work does popular fiction perform? What do we mean by "pleasure" reading? What other kinds of reading are there?