American Strangeness

Undergraduate

This course examines various elements of strangeness – the uncanny, the macabre, the absurd, the shocking – as seen in and through modern and contemporary American literature. How do authors depict, and how do readers contend with, bizarre phenomena? What is the role of readerly expectation (met and unmet)? How do concepts of “form” and “genre” react to and against competing concepts of strangeness? We will examine convention and its breaking, mysticism and supernaturality, and our changing sense of what counts as weird. HU MW 2:35pm-3:50pm