Teaching NON-HUMAN SUBJECTS: Monsters, Ghosts, Aliens, and Others

So, thanks to a retirement within the department, a General Education literature course called "Nonhuman Subjects: Monsters, Aliens, Ghosts, and Others" open up . . . and my application to teach it was accepted. 

 I'm surprisingly excited to teach this course -- "surprisingly" since, while I like teaching, I don't like it nearly as much as I like research. Hence much of my reading over the last month has been to familiarize myself with monster theory and, of course, reading a bunch of relevant texts (particularly those ghost stories I mentioned in my previous post). 

 Anyway, I've developed a pretty nifty looking syllabus (I <3 multimodality), but here's the reading list:


  • Beowulf, translated by Seamus Haney
  • Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated by Simon Armitage
  • Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein: The 1818 Text, edited by J. Paul Hunter
  • Crane, Stephen. "The Monster"
  • Hill, Susan. The Woman in Black
  • Wilde, Oscar. The Canterville Ghost and Other Stories
  •  Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis. Translated by Corngold
  • Baum, L. Frank. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,
  • Lovecraft, H. P. “The Call of Cthulu,” “The Rats in the Walls.”
  • Pohl, Frederick. “Day Million.,” &   Levine, David D. “Firewall.”
  • The Host (2006), directed by Joon-ho Bong—rentable on Youtube.com
  • District 9 (2009), directed by Neill Blomkamp—rentable on Youtube.com
  • Cleman, John [essay]. “Blunders of Virtue: The Problem of Race in Stephen Crane’s ‘The Monster.’”
  • Tolkien, J.R.R. [essay]. “The Monsters and the Critics.”
  • Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome [essay]. “Monster Studies: Seven Theses.”
Some hapless English department also made a post for my course as a means of helping enrollment. Here it is!


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