Spring 2014
English 281-06, TTH Topics in Literature
Zombies in Text and Film
Dr. Gerald Majer Coop 1 (building below the Exchange, in the Meditation Center)
Office and Voice Mail: 443-334-2467
Office Hours: w 1:30-2:30; TTH 1:40-2:40; and by appointment
Course Description
Studies selected topics that recur in literature across time and/or across cultures. Students read texts closely and analyze them as representative samples of the literary treatment of the topic.
Course Objectives:
Upon completion of this course, students will have demonstrated the ability to:
1. Solve a problem appropriate to the study of a specific topic whose context has been delineated to the point that several possible definitions can be inferred.
2. Read texts closely and analytically
3. Locate sources suitable for problems appropriate to the study of the specific topic and for an audience schooled in the literature of that topic.
4. Write competently and to the standard of the discipline in the academic style
5. Produce an effective organizational pattern with careful language choices during class participation and/or oral presentations
6. Read texts as complex interactions of values
Our broad guiding questions in this course:
What meanings, values, and affects attach to the Zombie narrative in literature, cinema, and contemporary culture?
In what respects is the Zombie about us, about “us and them”, and about ourselves as bodies with histories?
In what respects is the Zombie narrative always a story about work, labor, and economics?
In what respects does the Zombie figure make possible a meditation on the human as inhuman or “post-human”?
How can we place the Zombie narrative in the larger contexts of the Gothic genre, the modern Horror genre, and emergent genres of postmodern Horror? What specific features of literary form and language, both continuities and innovations, can we delineate in the construction of the modern and postmodern Zombie narrative?
For each reading assignment and film discussion, students must answer, in written form, 3 from the following list of interpretive questions. Your responses will be used for class discussion and will count toward your participation/contributions grade. Be prepared with these short written responses; missing one will impact your grade.
- What references to the broader historical/social world does the zombie figure in the story suggest? That is, does the zombie figure connect to anxieties about nation, race, social class, or gender? Consider where and when the story was published, the story’s likely audiences, and what kinds of fears and prejudices, and perhaps hopes and dreams, the Zombie tale may be speaking to.
- How do the form and language of the narrative support and heighten the meanings and affects associated with the zombie figure (for example: fear of a racial other, of an immigrant outsider, of a lower-class invader, of a gender outlaw; for example, privileging by contrast an “insider” racial, national, social-class, gender, or other group). Form and language include story chronology (linear or fragmented); story point-of view (first person, third person, etc.); authorial tone (satirical, tragic); imagery and figures of speech (descriptive language); and narrative frames (forms like the diary, the letter, the journal, the report, the case-history).
- What meanings and values are underscored by the narrative’s dramatic question and story climax (that is, its plot construction)? Does the story, for example, promulgate ideas about the normative and “the good”—certain models of the person, the family, the nation, what it means to be properly “living”?
- What is the place of work, labor, and profit-and-loss in the narrative? Is the story in any way an allegory of economics?
- What happens to bodies in the story? Are there moments that disturb, stretch, or revise our sense of what it means to be a living body? Try to observe very closely the descriptive and figurative language that focuses on bodies, zombie and non-zombie both.
- After week 3, you also may consider how the story incorporates main features of the Gothic genre and the Horror genre as aspects of the story’s articulation of specific meanings and values. Gothic: the female imprisonment/liberty scenario; the exposure of male/traditional power/tyranny motif; the male-exile motif; the Sublime excess/overwhelming motif. Horror: the Uncanny familiar/estrangement motif; the category-breakdown motif; the doubling motif; the multiplicity/swarming motif; the archaic/materiality-chaos motif.
Required Texts:
John Skipp, Ed., Zombies: Encounters with the Hungry Dead
Max Brooks, World War Z
(Online texts from Shelley, Stoker, Lovecraft, and Rohmer, as well as critical articles on Zombies, also will be assigned.)
Course Work Requirements
30% Midterm essay
35% Research-based final project
15% Final exam
10% Oral Presentation
10% Class participation/contributions
Class Policy
*Regular attendance and active class participation are expected. This means more than one unexcused absence is unacceptable in this class. If you are going to miss class meetings, you should not be in this class because the heart of it is the process of your ideas being presented and discussed. Deficits in attendance, participation, and presentations will affect the participation/contribution grade.
*Plagiarism is a serious academic offense and will result in an automatic F for the assignment. All cases of plagiarism will be reported to the Dean.
*All texts must be typed, double-spaced, 12-point Helvetica or Times New Roman font.
*Essays and presentations will be graded in accordance with Stevenson University Department of English standards, which evaluate content (ideas, argument, and evidence), organization, and grammar and style.
English 281 Schedule
1/14 Part One: Pre-Zombie
The Gothic Genre and the Undead. Film excerpts: Whale’s Frankenstein, Murnau’s Nosferatu.
1/16 Discussion of The Monster and the Vampire: based on assigned online readings including excerpts from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and from Stoker’s Dracula (tba via blog/email).
1/21 Discussion of assigned reading, online texts, “The Facts in the Case of M.Valdemar” and “Lot Number 249".” (tba via blog/email).
1/23 Discussion of assigned readings, Herbert West, Reanimator” (tba via blog/email).
1/28 Film excerpt: The Mummy. Discussion based on assigned excerpt from Roger Luckhurst article on Victorian mummies (tba via blog/email).
1/30 Part Two: Zombie Modern
Discussion based on assigned reading: Seabrook’s “Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields.”
2/4 The 1930s: White Zombie and I Walked With a Zombie, film excerpts. Read critical article on “Zonbi,” tba (on blog).
2/6 Discussion based on film excerpts. Midterm essay assigned, due 3/6/14.
2/11 The 1950s and After.
Discussion based on assigned readings: Stephen King, “The Return of Timmy Baterman” and Ray Bradbury “The Emissary.”
2/13 Discussion of assigned readings: Robert Bloch, “A Case of the Stubborns” and Neil Gaiman, “Bitter Grounds.”
2/18 Discussion of assigned reading, Theodore Sturgeon, “It.”
2/20 Discussion of assigned readings, George Saunders, “Sea Oak” and Dennis Etchison, “The Late Shift.”
2/25 Part Three: Postmodern Zombies
Discussion of assigned readings, Adam Golaski, “The Dead Gather on the Bridge to Seattle” and Mehitobel Wilson,
“The Quarantine Act.”
“The Quarantine Act.”
2/27 Discussion of assigned reading, Joe Lansdale, “On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks.”
3/4 Discussion of assigned readings, Robert McCammon, “Eat Me” and Kathe Koja, “The Prince of Nox.”
3/6 Film excerpt: TheWalking Dead, Season One. Midterm essay due in my email gmajer@stevenson.edu) in word.doc file attachment.
3/10-3/12: Spring break; please read Poppy Brite, “Calcutta, Lord of Nerves” and Lisa Morton, “Sparks Fly Upwards” for discussion in class 3/17.
3/18 Discussion of readings, above.
3/20 Discussion of assigned readings, Terry Morgan and Christoper Morgan,,” Zaambi” and Adam Troy-Castro, “Dead Like Me.”
3/25 Postmodern Zombies, Case 1: viewing of George Romero, Night of the Living Dead.
3/27 Discussion of Romero; excerpts from The Living Dead trilogy.
4/1 Postmodern Zombies, Case 2: viewing of 28 Days Later.
4/3 Discussion
4/8 Postmodern Zombies, Case 3: viewing of I Am Legend.
4/10 Discussion. Read article on Zombies and “bare life” (tba; on blog).
4/15 Discussion of assigned reading, Max Brooks, World War Z
4/17 World War Z.
4/22 Film excerpt and concluding discussion of World War Z.
4/24 Viewing of Zombieland.
4/28-4/30 Finals Week; Final exam tba.
No comments:
Post a Comment