The Fantastic in Literature, Art, and Media

Catalog description

This interdisciplinary course explores the varieties of the fantastic in literature, film, painting, and music, featuring alternate realities, monsters, shapeshifters, fairies, vampires, witches, doppelgangers, and mysterious animals. Authors include Poe, Le Fanu, Hoffman, Daphne du Maurier, Stevenson, Ambrose Bierce, T. H. White, Shirley Jackson, Donald Barthelme, Aimee Bender, and Margaret Atwood. Filmmakers include Carl Theodor Dryer, Jean Cocteau, Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, Jacques Tourneur, and Luis Buñuel. Opera, piano, and orchestral selections are by Weber, Mussorgsky, Berlioz, Crumb, Debussy, and Arnold Schönberg. We will examine aesthetic and cultural aspects, but also dive into psychological issues involving projection, wish-fulfillment, identity, and gender, supplemented by Freud’s “The Uncanny.”.