Whether it was Antigone, The Cherry Orchard, or One Hundred Years of Solitude, you've probably studied at least one text in translation before. How close was that translation to the original? What kind of writers are translators, and what do they do in practice? Is a translation a creative work of its own, or simply a reproduction of someone else's text? In this course, we'll examine these questions and more through a combination of readings in basic translation theory and exercises in literary translation. You don't need to know an additional language to take this course, so don't worry! Instead, we might compare translations of the same text and discuss their differences, "reconstruct" an original text by combining translated versions, or experiment with translating in other media, like visual art or theatre. If you do know multiple languages and are interested in translating, however, there will be opportunities for you to translate texts and share your work as well.

The science fiction and horror genres are a major part of contemporary English-speaking culture, but where did they come from? This course will attempt to answer that question, as we take a deep dive into British and American writings on the fantastical and the terrible through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, often referred to collectively as "weird fiction." We'll start with Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein," frequently described as the first science fiction novel; and we'll end with the works of H.P. Lovecraft, the so-called "father of American horror." Along the way, we'll examine the influence of socio-political, economic, and historical developments on these texts, as well as the contributions to genre fiction of the more "literary" movements of modernism, decadence, and Romanticism.

Gothic literature has, since its inception, been a genre of complicated, subversive, and difficult desire, one that represents queer and trans experience through metaphors of haunting, monstrosity, and uneasy otherness. In this course, we will examine Gothic literature as a repository of queer history, uncovering narratives of queer existence and its particular anxieties and intimacies in tales of vampires, lingering ghosts, and metamorphoses into animals. We'll move from the late Victorian origins of the Gothic, with fiction by Oscar Wilde and Arthur Machen, to the early twentieth-century queer women's Gothic of Daphne du Maurier and Shirley Jackson, and ultimately arrive at a contemporary, explicitly queer Gothic founded in speculative fiction, like the short stories of Carmen Maria Machado and Daisy Johnson. China Miéville wrote, "History can be written of monsters, and in them" -- join us and discover whose history monsters have been writing all along.