The course will combine a reading of canonical and popular fiction with psychoanalytic theory and philosophy to explore the intersection between horror and subjectivity. Horror's engagement with liminality will be seen as a path to the study of the concept of the subject and the attending fears of its dissolution.
The course explores the significant connection between the evolution of the subject as a philosophical concept and the way we understand agency and inspiration in moments of creativity. We will tease out the dynamic relation between the two by attending to the scene of interrupted writing in works of fiction and poetry from Romanticism to the present. Close readings will be accompanied by a number of critical essays that reflect on authorship and the subject.
The course follows the evolution of literary representations of evil from the Renaissance to the 20th Century. We will return to some of the canonical works of English and American literature in examining the manner in which different historical contexts effect significant changes in the conceptualization and articulation of notions of antagonism and transgression.
We will read key texts of critical theory from the early to the late Twentieth Century, representative of Structuralism, Poststructuralism, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, New Historicism, Posthumanism and Disability Studies.
The course aims to review some of the writings of key figures in the history of literary criticism in order to trace an evolution in the way literature has been defined, understood and evaluated from Plato to the present. We follow shifting attitudes towards representation, truth, reality, being, subjectivity, origin and copy, similarity and difference all contribute to changes in genre formation and the coordinates of literary appreciation.
In the course of the semester we will engage in close readings of a number of canonical Conrad novels from Heart of Darkness to Under Western Eyes. The aim is to familiarize students with Conrad's unique idiom, to identify his stylistic innovations and to comment on their contribution to the formation of Modernist narrative.
