3.00 Credits
Uncanny fantasy stories, slasher movies, and heavy metal mt1sic are just a few examples of the unpopular culture the course considers. Beginning with the weird fictions of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, we'll read, watch, and listen through the twentieth century, unearthing significant movements and texts in unpopular culture, in America and elsewhere, and socio political responses to these weird fictions. Through close analysis of fiction, films, and other media, students examine the parameters of aesthetic taste, good and bad, and consider the social at1d cultural work that underground, alternative, and sub-sub genre texts do. Throughout we will consider why and how so many of those texts have proven so su111risingly popular, so strangely pleasurable, and oddly important.