Professor: Casey Shoop

credits 4.00

• CRN 22620: Tuesday & Thursday, 10:00-11:20am @ CHA 201

It has become commonplace to argue that humans are not autonomous beings defined against an inert natural order but rather defined and realized through their relations with other entities. We are entangled with other worlds: animal, microbial, mineral, technological, and so on. What’s more, this entanglement is often credited with ethical and political potential. Through these narratives of entanglement we might critique human exceptionalism, undo various forms of environmental damage, and take responsibility for other environments and forms of creaturely life.

But entanglement can also be downright terrifying, a form of bodily horror. “Nature,” as Emily Dickinson once said, “is a haunted house.”  On this view, to be “at one with nature” isn’t a happy lesson to be learned, but a threat to one’s life or the end of the world as such. Everywhere in popular culture we see evidence of uncanny weather, dark ecology, and gothic elemental forces that seem intent on destruction and vengeance.

How to reckon with these two conflicting visions of our relationship with contemporary ecology? This class will think about this ambivalent entanglement through the genre of the environmental horror film, literature, and philosophy. Does it make sense to think of Nature as a teacher at all? Can we lose ourselves completely and still learn Nature’s lesson?

We will try to answer these questions and many others by spending time with Alfred Hitchcock’s Birds and Steven Spielberg’s Jaws but also with more contemporary forms of environmental horror and monstrosity: viruses and environmental pollution, alien forms that seek to mix their DNA with human beings, climate change apocalypse. What kinds of critical work does the horror genre do, if any? Is there an analytic value in feeling terrified?

We’ll take up writings about the horror genre, and we’ll look at literary representations of horror from some of its earlier practitioners like  H.P. Lovecraft and Algernon Blackwood to contemporary writers like Carmen Maria Machado, Victor LaValle, and Jeff VanderMeer, among many others. Along the way, we’ll also explore some of the current theoretical writings on entanglement in philosophy, feminism, and science studies. Don't be afraid!