Course Description
Summary
It鈥檚 one thing to feel scared when we watch scary movies, and it鈥檚 another to feel that same fear as we read books. After all, in books, there鈥檚 no eerie music, nor the possibility of being jolted by a sudden jump scare. Yet still, horror writing abounds and writers throughout history have found ways of communicating dread, terror, paranoia, and anguish through the written word.
The French Continental philosopher Maurice Blanchot writes: 鈥淒isaster shuts down language. Disaster cannot be fathomed. Disaster stops all speech because the suffering it causes is so total and complete.鈥 Ironically, horror writing emerges out of this disastrous speechlessness, mining the breakdown of speech for its capacity to fundamentally disorient and perturb us. And what happens too when the horror we face is not some supernatural creature but instead the human? Then we find ourselves in the afterlife of the postcolonial, or own present-day paranoid condition in which late-stage capitalism forms the suspenseful backdrop of our inevitable demise.
鈥淥ur first fear remains annihilation, and this fear can apply to all kinds of anxieties throughout our lives,鈥 says Mary Elizabeth Borkowski, describing the inherent paranoid horror of activist politics. Horror writing鈥撯搊r otherwise, the writing of the disaster鈥撯搒prings out of a lived persecutory reality, one which the postcolonial activist is intimately aware of. Thus our examination of horror writing will comprise a series of horror films and literary texts, as well as texts from psychology (e.g. Melanie Klein鈥檚 description of 鈥減aranoia鈥) and postcolonial social/cultural criticism.
Students will work collaboratively on the creation of multi-genre work of horror: a single short-form horror film co-created by the group, as well as individual writings on horror, which will accompany the film. It is suggested that students have prior experience in Film/Video or Media Studies; however, it is not required.
