123045 PS PS Literary Studies (2024S)

Like the shapeless terrors and unseen forces it depicts, the speculative mode known as ‘weird fiction’ eludes simple classification. Uneasily distinguished from horror and science fiction, it lurked out of sight of literary criticism until the 1980s, after which time scholarly and popular interest has grown steadily. In this Proseminar, students will consider a mode that has been described as the ‘foundational aesthetic category […] of the new millennium’ (Greve and Zappe, 2021), but whose origins can be traced as far back as the nineteenth century.

This course is organized thematically and chronologically, tracing a line through late-Victorian stories of bodily transformation (The Great God Pan), early-twentieth-century investigations of extra-sensory perception (‘The Three Drugs’ and ‘The Five Senses’) and monstrous forms (‘The Wendigo’), to later-century documentations of otherworldly visitations (‘The Color out of Space’), maddeningly ancient civilizations (At the Mountains of Madness), and Cold War tales of domesticated weirdness (‘The Daemon Lover’ and ‘The Lovely House’).

The course will simultaneously address questions of literary form and genre; the relationship between literature and science; epistemology, strategies of representation, and perception; and period-specific historical contexts (fin-de-siècle spiritualism, Antarctic exploration, and mid-twentieth-century conceptions of femininity). We will also revise various analytical methods and theoretical approaches, and students will have the chance to further develop their analytical and academic writing skills, as well as gain basic theoretical tools for the critical analysis and interpretation of literary texts.

By the end of this course students will be able to
• Recognize core characteristics and examples of weird fiction, and be able to explain these in relation to genre, form, and period-specific contexts;
• Find and cite sources, formulate a research question, and structure a research paper, among other core academic skills;
• Apply close reading strategies with secondary sources to develop a written analysis of a case study.