This course examines the currents of English-language literary approaches of the 20th and 21st centuries from across the world through the lens of ‘weird and eerie’ fiction. Since the early 20th century, weird literature has offered wonderful, terrifying, and other-worldly glimpses into ever-shifting issues that have united aspects of our lives throughout the decades. If, as Mark Fisher claims, weird and eerie fiction faces a “preoccupation with the strange […], a fascination for the outside” (8), then the analytic possibilities of such literature – ecological, politically radical, psychoanalytic – are infinite by definition. This course therefore explores a literature of potentialities throughout a century of diverse voices united under the theme of making the familiar strange or achieving, in the words of H.P. Lovecraft, “the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension.”
- Enseignant: Patrick Aura