Course information |
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Title |
The Literary Fantastic |
Lecturer |
KÉRCHY Anna |
Course code |
YSE_BTK-011 |
Credit |
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Location |
? |
Time |
Wed 10-12 |
Course description |
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Short description |
The course provides an overview of the literary-historical development (since the Enlightenment) and the manifold theoretical problematizations of Fantastic Fiction in English. We shall explore the purest form fantasy along with the amazing variety of subgenres ranging from Gothic ghost stories to postmodern cyberpunk, discussing on our way Romantic tales, Victorian phantasmagorias, high fantasy legendarium, modernist de/mythologizations, magic/al ir/realism, urban fantasy, dystopia, science fiction, steampunk, dark fantasy, paranormal romance, feminist/queer revisions, heroic fantasies of history and religion, contemporary young adult and children’s quest fantasies, horror and body genres, and the filmic fantastic. Students will be familiarized with recurrent themes and critical-theoretical concerns of the fantastic mode such as worldmaking, rhetorics, topography, hesitation, subversion, metamorphosis, mirror images, multiplying selves, bodily disintegration, dis/enchantment, escapism, non-signification, etc. Authors covered include Shelley, Stoker, Stevenson, Wilde, Carroll, MacDonald, Poe, Woolf, Wells, Tolkien, Lewis, Lovecraft, Baum, Le Guin, Bradbury, Herbert, Rushdie, Morrison, Carter, Winterson, Atwood, Burgess, Dick, Adams, King, Rowling, Gaiman, Pratchett, Pullman, Miéville, Martin, Martel, Ness, Burton, Lynch, Miyazaki, etc. |
Schedule |
Filmic adaptations of the fantastic from Méliès to Lynch
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Semester |
Fall . |
Requirements |
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Requirements to get the grade |
Final written exam, Attend min 50% of lectures |
Reading list |
Robert Louis Stevenson. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde C.S. Lewis. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe Jeanette Winterson. The Passion Philip K Dick. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean. The Wolves in the Walls Patrick Ness. A Monster Calls & JRR Tolkien. (1939) “On Fairy Stories.” Tree and Leaf. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. CS Lewis (1952) “Three Ways of Writing for Children.” Of Other Worlds. Essays and Stories. New York: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt. 1994. 22-35. GK Chesterton, (1908) “The Ethics of Elfland.” Orthodoxy. Rockville: Serenity, 2008. 40-56. Todorov, Tzvetan. “The Uncanny and the Fantastic” in The Fantastic, Cornell UP, 1970.
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Suggested reading list |
Clute, John and John Grant, eds. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. 1997. Online edition: http://sf-encyclopedia.uk/fe.php?id=0&nm=introduction_to_the_online_text |