Transformations: Novels between Genres, Genders, and Species

Late-Victorian and twentieth-century novels keep slipping across the lines we use to sort the world, realism into fantasy, woman into man, human into animal, and this course treats that slippage as the actual subject, not a quirk of the texts. You read a tight set of boundary-crossing novels (Woolf's Orlando, Han Kang's The Vegetarian, Beukes's Zoo City, with Cortázar in the mix) alongside excerpts from Orientalism, Gothic and uncanny theory, postcolonial criticism, and psychology, then bring that theoretical vocabulary to bear in two midterms and analytical writing. It sits on the upper-level ELIT side of the curriculum, assuming you've already done close reading and basic literary theory, and it's where you start handling hybridity as a critical tool rather than just a label.