Courses > 2020 Fall

Graduate Courses

CIMS 582 - STUDIES IN THE FANTASTIC

FREN 582 | COML 589
401 | SEM | Philippe Met | M 2-4pm | TBA

The aim of the course will be to confront a number of key texts (mostly French-language short tales and novellas of 19th and 20th century) pertaining to the “fantastique” with films which for the most part are not explicit screen adaptations of the literary texts under scrutiny. A variety of approaches – thematic, psychoanalytic, cultural, narratological, intermedial – will be deployed in an attempt to test their viability and define the subversive force of a genre that generally contributes to shedding light on the dark side of the human psyche by interrogating the “real” as well as the “letter”, making visible the unseen and articulating the unsaid. Such broad categories as distortions of space and time, reason and madness, order and disorder, sexual transgressions, self and other, human and posthuman, mind and body, literalness and allegoricity will be examined.