American Weird

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course provides an intense look at the weirdness at the heart of American culture. From the recent HBO series Lovecraft Country to Edgar Allan Poe, cosmic horror, alien artifacts, and a profound unease is at the heart of our weird tales. In contemporary American culture, the weird has become a powerful tool for representing the legacies of racial violence through generic tropes. Throughout the semester, we will study the "new weird" in contemporary American culture, but also what the rock critic Griel Marcus has called "the old, weird America" that it refers to, reaching back to the pulp fiction of the Weird Tales and the gothic residues of the nineteenth century. Creative and critical assignments.