LIT 5017 Fall 2024 - Sperling

This course will study "the weird" as a cultural formation indebted to the gothic, and as a mode adjacent to the supernatural, horror, and science fiction. Tracing weirdness as a modernist literary phenomenon named outright by H.P. Lovecraft in the 1920s into the present as it has reemerged in the 21st century "New Weird," we will examine various literary traditions that inform weird fictions of the 20th and 21st century, paying particular attention to the parallel (if not crossed) paths of the weird as a theoretical vector often unaware of the Weird's literary history. To this end, we will look at how weirdness unsettles genre, grapples with the unknown or names the unnameable, upends dominant epistemic frameworks, identifies confrontations with "otherness" and "deviance" especially in relation to racial difference and anti-blackness, and how what some are calling "global weirding" operates as a broader ecocritical framework in the Anthropocene. Readings therefore attend to gender, race, disability, class, and theories of difference that undergird the ways in which the weird often serves as a placeholder for that which cannot be described with any existing (often scientific) framework. Noting that "Weird" has also recently become a surprising buzz word on the American political scene when Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz proclaimed to the Morning Joe television crew of the Republican nominees that "these guys are just weird," this course aims to think through if and how weirdness operates in relation to the political and what weird cultural texts attempt to shift or challenge in that register. Readings will include a fair amount theory in addition to novels, short stories, visual arts, performance and film, and hopefully the course can include some time outside and/or in community spaces.

Requirements: This course will fulfill the requirement for Post-1900 Literary and Cultural Studies (American, British, Irish) and a Literary Genre (Fiction).  It also meets the Alterity requirement.