LIBS 135: Urban Monsters&Suburb Angels

Course Description

If cities are the centers of human civilization, then why have we inherited such horrific stereotypes of urban environments? This course analyzes how writers (screenwriters, dramatists, urban theories, architects novelists, and poets) tried to reimagine cities (both in America and Britain) as both a unified community of English-speaking individuals and a globalizing model of “civilized” social organization between 1660 and the present. In doing so, the course argues that our understanding the “monstrous” connotations of cities depends upon our imagining the simultaneous creation of morally “angelic” middle-class suburbs in both gothic and horror writing and visual art. Reading may include Dracula, Journal of a Plague Year, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Linden Hills, and The Jungle.