SPAN 43.07 Spooky Spain: Modern Horror in Literature, Film and Art
Modern horror is usually the shocking effect of natural or supernatural events that both logical and scientific modes of thinking cannot properly explain and control. Some of these events have an intrinsically human and social character, and others defy reason’s attempts to insert them into our historical and secular continuum (monsters, ghosts, physiological mutations). In this course, students will be exposed to a variety of horror genres and motifs in some Spanish literary texts, films, and paintings. In these works, we will explore issues such as the (female) body, economic and political crises, the family and the haunted house, religion and modernization, and Nature, among other sources of horrific affects. This will also help us understand the connection between horror, on the one hand, and the uncanny, anxiety, abjection, surprise, guilt, and pleasure, on the other.