EL 5067
Literature of the Fantastic
Professor Amie Parry 白瑞梅
Fall 2009

Time：Wednesday 234
Place：C2-437
Office：A218; x33215
amie.parry@gmail.com subject heading: EL5067 + your name

Description:

Fantastic literature is usually understood to be set in the familiar world while disrupting the familiar sense of its reality. We will explore gothic, science fiction, and modernist versions of the fantastic, especially in texts that anticipate or make use of the psychoanalytic insight into the primacy of the unconscious in determining behavior and desire. Unlike literary realism, the literature of the fantastic presents a fictional universe that operates according to rules that seem to challenge post-Enlightenment understandings of reality, self and society. We will look at how 「fantastic」 cultural texts pose these challenges as they foreground power relations in storytelling (in content--e.g. by thematizing writing technologies--and in narrative techniques) and in sexuality (to include not only homoeroticism but also class, race and age-based taboos).

Requirements:

Weekly responses     30%
Oral presentations     20%
Midterm paper     20%
Final paper     30%

The weekly response is a short (1-2 pages) analysis of the treatment or representation of a relevant issue in the assigned text. The issue will be assigned with the reading for the week. The response should never be a general description of the text, but your own focused engagement with it. I want to see how you read the text, bringing your own knowledge to bear on it while also making use of the material introduced and discussed in class.

The presentations on theoretical texts will present the main thesis and argument and place this within the concerns of the seminar by reading aloud key passages and explicating them, making connections to related issues in other texts we have covered, and bringing up thoughtful questions for the class to discuss. Presentations on cultural texts should provide an analysis of the text by utilizing the theoretical frameworks from previous readings. The task is not only to apply the theory to the literature but to see how the literary and theoretical texts can be made to speak to each other, and what useful insights might emerge from their combination. Presentations should take approximately 40-50 minutes (or the first hour of the seminar, not including discussion of the questions).

Papers: The midterm paper will be on an assigned topic covering the readings from the first unit of the course. The final paper topics will be proposed by students, preferably drawing on the work they have done in the second and third units. Papers should show what students have learned over the course of the seminar, and their own thinking on the materials. Papers must be turned in on time to receive full points. Failure to turn in the final paper will result in a grade of 0 for the course.

Plagiarism: A plagiarized response will result in a failing grade for that response with no chance to make it up. The same goes for a plagiarized midterm paper. A plagiarized final paper will result in a grade of 0 for the course.

Textbooks: In addition to the course reader (it will be available at Gauguan), students must get their own copies of Frankenstein, The Horned Man, The Turn of the Screw, and Dracula.

Schedule of classes: