We may consider the experience of love to be intensely personal and private, but literature, drama, and film frequently portray narratives of courtship, marriage, erotic desire, or romance within a larger social context. Romantic love between individuals in these texts may be situated within and therefore impinged upon by a family entity, a social class, or even a state. Other forms of love (familial love, or love between friends, for instance) may start to take center stage.

How does one narrate the self? For centuries, people have been aiming to record their lives by presenting their struggles and outlining their memories, offering insights along the way. Why—and for whom—are we repeatedly compelled to articulate our own life stories? Is this a vain and selfish project, does it expose a didactic aspiration to teach others, or should we think of such efforts as merely an exercise in nostalgia? Most importantly, what assumptions about memory and language does this endeavor reveal?

This course will consider texts that are engaged in the process of rewriting. Reading across historical periods, language traditions, and literary genres, we’ll interrogate what happens as ideas, forms, identities, and histories are revisited and transformed. How are characters, plots, or genres translated across time and space? Is the act of rewriting one of simple reproduction, or is it one of transformation? What are the political stakes of such acts of revision? How do they trouble our sense of the relationship between the categories of “original” and “copy”?

Monsters, demons, and other similar ghouls often serve as powerful metaphorical manifestations of social, political, or psychic tensions; as such, they play a key role in numerous literary, cinematic, and other artistic works. In this class, we will be looking at various representations of the monstrous and the demonic in an attempt to better understand what it is, precisely, that they give us: what kinds of ideas do these figures bring to light, and how can they help us refine our own critical thinking?

“With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.”

-Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde