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Forget about the American Dream. This module explores the nightmarish and phantasmagorical hinterlands of the American project. It will cover that which is repressed, depraved, monstrous, grotesque, terrifying, disturbing, unsettling, marginal, and bizarre in its culture. Together we will seek to account for the existence of these horrors, through historicising, close reading, and conceptualising them via the contested histories of race, gender, sexuality, and class in the US. We will be looking at different genres and the troubled worlds contained within them. Students can expect to read in any given year works in the gothic, horror, noir and neo-noir, grotesque, racial melodrama, black comedy, crime, war, dystopian, science fiction, mystery traditions. There will be a particular emphasis on the claim that minoritarian histories make on these modes; and, to analyse a diverse set of texts, including films, poetry, graphic novels, theatre, music, and visual art, alongside novels, written from a variety of different social positions.
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