Finding Monsters (a case of serendipity)

When hunting for books to be reviewed in Fafnir, I realized that the University of Minnesota Press has been doing some good work in weird fiction and monster studies. One of their forthcoming books is The Monster Theory Reader (2019), edited by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, incidentally the reviews editor for JFA, and one of the reader's notable inclusions, at least according to the advertising blurb, is "Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s foundational essay 'Monster Theory (Seven Theses).'"

 Well! I've been teaching that essay each of my two semesters for ENGL 160D: Nonhuman Subjects: Monsters, Ghosts, Aliens, and Others. You see, when I first got the class, I had no clue about anything in Monster Studies as a field, so I did a quick search in the library. Cohen's essay was basically the first thing I found -- and that's how I chose it for my course. Yes, I know, not a rigorous methodology . . . but, now that I know that, by pure luck of the draw, I've been teaching one of the field's foundational essays, I'm quite relieved!

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