Course goals
- An understanding of the history and development of popular genres and the cultural production of fiction for the masses.
- Close knowledge of key terms and approaches to popular fiction.
- Critical skills in the close reading and analysis of popular texts with attention to genre.
- Knowledge of the origins and conventions of specific genres including knowledge of major authors and key texts.
- An ability to situate popular texts in their intellectual, historical and critical contexts.
Content
This course explores the field of popular fiction and its relationship to aesthetics and nomers such as trash, pulp, cult and kitsch, examining its capacity to mass manipulate as well as anarchically liberate its readership. The course explores theoretical and genre-specific approaches to popular fiction as a varied field of genres, each with their own literary history and their own set of aesthetic criteria. Key questions in the course are:
What sort of cultural work do these narratives perform in the socio-historical moment in which they appear? What social tensions and ambiguities are negotiated in these texts, and what sort of resolution does the text propose? What are the aesthetic criteria that it engages with, and what are the pleasures of this text? What makes certain formulas popular in specific periods? How is a particular genre or text produced and received? How does a text interact with other media? What sort of readership does it attract? What reading strategies are appropriate and useful in understanding and evaluating popular texts? This course draws on theories of
cultural studies, genre studies and critical theory and asks students to employ strategies of close as well as distant reading. Students will closely investigate a number of genres that may vary from year to year but may include the following: fantasy, science fiction, romance, middlebrow, crime, mystery, gothic, and comics.