This course examines monsters in fiction and on screen. Monsters are things that we are not. Conceptualized as the “Other”, monsters help define what humans are. They embody collective cultural anxieties and fears about pressing issues of our age, transgressing the boundaries of social normativity. More than merely creating chaos and destruction in the human world, monsters prompt us to re-evaluate our perception of difference, our cultural assumptions about gender, sexuality, and race, why we have created them, and ultimately, what it means to be human. Students taking this course are expected to: 1. Develop critical thinking skills by exploring how monsters challenge or reinforce social norms and power structures; 2. Improve communication skills through writing and discussion about the cultural meaning of monsters; 3. Analyze representations of monsters in various media and interpret their significance in relation to issues of identity, race, sexuality, and gender.

Theories
Jeffrey J. Cohen. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)”. Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 1996. Page. 3-25；
Barbara Creed. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 1993. Page 1-7.
Gayle Rubin. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex” (1975).
Gan Bao 甘寳. “The Theory of Five Energies” (變化論). In Search of the Supernatural 搜神記. Translated by J. I. Crump. Stanford University Press, 1996. Page 143-44.
Fiction:
The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. Translated by C. W. Moseley. Penguin Classics, 2005. Selected passages.
Mary Shelley. Frankenstein. Penguin Classics, 2018. Selected chapters.
Bram Stoker. Dracula. Penguin Classics, 2013. Selected chapters.
Pu Songling. “Painted Skin” (hua pi 畫皮), “A Chinese Ghost Story” (Nie xiaoqian 聶小倩). Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio 聊齋誌異. Translated by John Minford. Penguin Classics, 2006.
Films:
The Hunger (1983); Green Snake (qing she青蛇, 1993); Painted Skin (畫皮, 2008)