Proseminar: American Topographies of the Fantastic 4219-ZP052
The proseminar offers students an investigation into how American literature engages with the fantastic—encompassing such modalities as, for example, the gothic, the weird, and the speculative—to imagine, contest, and reconfigure space and place. We examine how these genres construct haunted zones of alternative geographies/ locations, often of fear, wonder and monstrosity, that reflect and refract historical tensions, ideological conflicts, cultural anxieties or personal traumas. Drawing on key concepts from spatial theory—such as heterotopias, liminality, and the chronotope—students will explore how fictional terrains like haunted houses, imaginary cities, speculative frontiers, and post-apocalyptic landscapes function as critical spaces that challenge dominant narratives of identity, history, and belonging. The proseminar further incorporates ecogothic theory and environmental weirding which examines the intersection of gothic and weird aesthetics with environmental anxieties and ecological degradation. This approach foregrounds how fantastic scapes and zones register both human and nonhuman hauntings, revealing the fraught relations between nature, culture, and capital. Thus the proseminar asks: How does the fantastic map the American imagination? In what ways do these imagined topographies offer tools for critique, resistance, or re-enchantment?
In addition to critical reading and discussions, the course provides support for developing independent BA thesis projects. Students will be introduced to a range of research methodologies relevant to literary and cultural analysis, including close reading, intertextual comparison, contextual research, and the application of theoretical frameworks. The seminar emphasizes the formulation of clear research questions, the development of thesis arguments, and the effective use of primary and secondary sources. Students will gain experience in scholarly writing practices, including bibliography building, theoretical integration, and argument structuring. The proseminar will aslo support projects that engage with film, visual culture, or digital media in addition to literary texts, provided that they can be inscribed into the theoretical framework of the course.
Type of course
obligatory courses
Mode
Course coordinators
Learning outcomes
Learning outcomes
Upon completing the course, the student:
• has knowledge of key trends in American fantastic literature, including its gothic, speculative, and weird forms
• is familiar with foundational literary and cultural theories relevant to the study of the fantastic and understands their application in textual analysis
• is able to recognize and interpret fantastic genres as tools of social, cultural, and historical critique
• understands core concepts in the poetics of space, critical geography, environmental humanities, and the cultural theory of place and topography
• knows the basic principles of intellectual property, copyright law, academic integrity, and anti-plagiarism ethics
• can apply analytical tools to both literary and visual texts within an academic framework
• is capable of effectively gathering, evaluating, and critically assessing scholarly sources, and of summarizing and paraphrasing them
• is able to design a BA thesis project, define its topic, aims, scope, and compile an appropriate bibliography
• demonstrates sensitivity to the rhetorical and ideological dimensions of cultural texts
• understands the importance of research integrity and consciously rejects unethical practices such as plagiarism
Assessment criteria
Assessment methods and assessment criteria
• BA thesis plan with a minimum of 10 pages of written text – 50%
• Outline of the thesis statement organizing the argument – 10%
• Annotated bibliography – 20%
• Preparation for and participation in class – 20%
Bibliography
Selected literature (may be modified slanting towards students’ interests):
Adamson, J., W.A. Gleason, and D.N. Pellow. Keywords for Environmental Studies. New
York: NYU Press, 2016.
Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2010.
Alaimo, Stacy. Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
Allewaert, Monique. Ariel’s Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the
American Tropics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press,
1994.
Blanco, Maria del Pilar, and Esther Peeren, eds. The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and
Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.
Braidotti, Rosi and Maria Hlavajova, eds. Posthuman Glossary. Bloomsbury Academic,
2018.
Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge,
1990.
Cisco, Michael. Weird Fiction. London, New York: Palgrave, 2023.
Cisco, Michael. “What Is Weird Fiction?” Weird Fiction Review, June 2014.
https://weirdfictionreview.com/2014/06/what-is-weird-fiction/
Clark, Timothy, ed. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, and Lowell Duckert, eds. Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with
Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1996.
Comaroff, Joshua and Ong Ker-Shing, Horror in Architecture (Oro Editions, 2018);
Crow, Charles. History of the Gothic: American Gothic. University of Wales Press, 2009.
Dixon, Wheeler Winston. A History of Horror. New York: Rutgers University Press, 2010.
Edwards, Justin D. and Rune Graulund, Grotesque. Routledge, 2013.
Emmett, Robert S. and David E. Nye. The Environmental Humanities: A Critical
Introduction. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017. Farrier, David.
Fawver, Kurt, “Why Weird? Why Now? On the Rationale for Weird Fiction Resurgence” in:
Thinking Horror. A Journal of Horror Philosophy, Volume 1, 2015
Fisher, Mark, The Weird and the Eerie. Repeater Books, 2016.
Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias.”
Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité 5 (1984): 46–49. Translated by Jay Miskowiec.
Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Harman, Graham. Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy. Winchester: Zero Books, 2012.
Heise, Usula K. Sense of Place, Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the
Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Joshi, S.T. The Modern Weird Tale: A Critique of Horror Fiction. West Cornwall, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1990.
Joshi, S.T., The Modern Weird Tale. McFarland & Company, 2001.
Joshi, S.T., Varieties of the Weird Tale. Hippocampus Press, 2017
Kearney, Richard, Strangers, Gods and Monsters. Routledge, 2003
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
Ligotti, Thomas, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (Penguin Books, 2018);
Lloyd-Smith, Allan. American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction. New York: Continuum,
2007.
Lovecraft, H.P., Collected Essays, Volume 2: Literary Criticism, (eds.) S.T. Joshi
Hippocampus Press, 2004.
Mieville, China, “Weird Fiction” in: Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, (eds.) Mark
Bould et al. (Routledge, 2013);
Morton, Timothy, Hyperobjects. Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World.
University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
Morton, Timothy, Being Ecological. Pelican Books, 2018.
Poole, W. Scott, Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror. Counterpoint,
2018.
Royle, Nicholas, The Uncanny. Manchester University Press, 2003.
Sederholm, Carl H. And Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, The Age of Lovecraft. University of
Minnesota Press, 2016.
Shaw, Philip, The Sublime. Routledge, 2017.
Szeman, Imre, and Boyer, Dominic, eds. Energy Humanities: An Anthology. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2017.
Thacker, Eugene, After Life. The University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Thacker, Eugene, In the Dust of This Planet. Horror of Philosophy Vol. 1. Zero Books, 2011.
Thacker, Eugene, Starry Speculative Corpse. Horror of Philosophy Vol. 2. Zero Books, 2015.
Thacker, Eugene, Tentacles Longer Than Night. Horror of Philosophy Vol. 3. Zero Books,
2011.
Toop, David, Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener. Continuum, 2010.
Trigg, Dylan, The Thing. A Phenomenology of Horror. Zero Books, 2014.
Trigg, Dylan, Topophobia. A Phenomenology of Anxiety. Bloomsbury, 2016.
Vilder, Anthony, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays on the Modern Unhomely (The MIT
Press, 1994);
Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew, “The New Weird” in: New Directions in Popular Fiction: Genre,
Distribution, Reproduction, (ed.) Ken Gelder (Palgrave, 2016);
Willems, Brian, Speculative Realism and Science Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2017);
Zapf, Hubert, Literature as Cultural Ecology (Bloomsbury, 2017).
Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew, eds. The Cambridge Companion to American Gothic.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Additional information
Additional information (registration calendar, class conductors, localization and schedules of classes), might be available in the USOSweb system: