ENGL 90280 - Bodily Fear, Fantastic Fiction

Institution:

University of Notre Dame

Subject:

English

Description:

This course deals with the body's fearful and fascinated consciousness of change in relation to organic and inorganic beings. In short stories and novels we see the development of relations with animals, ghosts, fairies, demons, angels and goblins. But the human or humanoid can also identify itself with an inanimate object, or even merge with it. Compelling clutter abounds. "Character" becomes a questionable concept as beasts, material objects and spirits become quasi-humanoid. The course reading centers in the late 18th and 19th century, but we start with The Golden Ass, that profoundly influential novel written by a North African member of the Roman empire who offers us a destabilizing fiction of metamorphosis, a story exhibiting the instability of all sorts of boundaries and classes, including formal boundaries between human and animal. Theoretical material includes work by Freud and Darwin, as well as commentary by Bakhtin, Todorov, de Certeau, and Haraway, but it is nowhere assumed that the critics are superior to the novelists and story-writers, who are also powerful theorists in their own way.

Credits:

3.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.nd.edu

Phone Number:

(574) 631-5000

Regional Accreditation:

North Central Association of Colleges and Schools

Calendar System:

Semester

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