Expository writing based on analysis of selected masterpieces of ancient and modern literature. R1A satisfies the first half of the Reading and Composition requirement, and R1B satisfies the second half.

Horrēre (Latin, v.): To shiver; to have one’s hair stand on end. “If this movie doesn’t make your skin crawl, it’s on too tight!” –– Tagline for Black Christmas (1974) What do we talk about when we talk about horror? Horror is, of course, a genre, though the recent spate of prestige horror movies make it clear that genre is rarely ever simple or limited in scope. But it’s also a reaction, as much about the response to a text as what’s actually in it. And from Get Out to Stranger Things, from Frankenstein to Hill House, it seems that horror—in more ways than one—is the moment. This class will engage with horror, and horrific texts, from a variety of time periods, languages, cultures, genres, and forms. Like horror itself, we won’t try to limit ourselves to narrow terms or a single subcategory: the horrors on offer move from monsters and ghosts to the winter tundra and debilitating illness, from the horrors of “madness” to the unspeakable crises of history to the possible horrors of language itself. Together we will explore (and interrogate) different imaginative, affective, and ethical dimensions of horror, alongside applications of literary theory and training in close reading and college-level literary analysis. Course Goals and Methods As an R1B, this course will be working toward three interrelated goals. First is the ability to read, engage with, and relate to a variety of texts and forms at the college level. Much of this involves embracing the immateriality of analysis itself: like horror itself, college-level analysis is rarely just one thing. Instead of fishing for “right” answers, you may find that meaning starts to be something that emerges from our interactions with texts––that ineffable genesis that is more than the sum of its parts. Some of you may feel very comfortable with this already; some may not. I hope this course offers something on this front regardless of where you fall on that spectrum. You may find that the novels you read in high school were simply not your thing, but that “reading” and analyzing experimental mixed-media is exciting to you. Or you may find that the close readings we do in this class shift or expand the ways you have interacted with literature until now. The second goal of this course is to further refine the skill of college-level analytical writing you learned in R1A. We focus on how to generate an original argument about a text, based on the process of what’s called close reading: thinking less about what is happening in a text than how things happen. What does a text “do”? How does the form of a text create its meaning? And as critics, what might we offer––what new meanings can we generate––by interacting with a text? To this end, we practice regular, weekly writing workshops to help remind you of the nuts-and-bolts of analytical writing, as well as regular writing assignments that encourage you to start from focused close readings, and then expand and revise that work into a full analytical paper. Writing in this class never disappears into the ether, but comes back as we return to it over and over, working with and through it. The final goal of the course is to do secondary research for analytical papers in the humanities. How do you find and discern strong works of theory or analysis to bring into your own papers? Once you find them, how do you get through the often frustrating, difficult style in which these sources are written? We build up to this over the course of the semester, including by reading secondary sources and theory alongside some of our primary texts in the course, and finally through an analytical research paper which you will present to your peers in the last week of the course. Selected Readings (subject to change) Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House. Han Kang, The Vegetarian. William Shakespeare, Macbeth. Short stories by Virgilio Piñera, Edgar Allan Poe, Edogawa Ranpo, Jack London, E.T.A. Hoffman. Selected Films (subject to change) The Woman in the Dunes (1964) Torso (1973) The Re-Animator 2 (1989) Pizza (2012)

Enrolled students must attend the first two weeks of class. If a student must miss a class OR cannot access the class's bcourses site, they must communicate with the instructor, or they may be subject to an instructor drop.

Requisites

• UC Entry Level Writing Requirement or UC Analytical Writing Placement Exam. 1A or equivalent is prerequisite to 1B.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills