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!