This course descends into the lurid world of pulp fiction in the early twentieth century, torch in hand, to explore the historical emergence of sensational genres such as crime, horror, science fiction, and fantasy adventure, in literature and comics. We will study them, curse them, and revel in them as outlandish experiments with normative ways of thinking about self and society, rivalling those of the high-culture avant-garde. We’ll consult mad scientists, muscled barbarians, woman robots, tentacled monsters, femme fatales, and many more denizens of this barely restrained, rarely woke, modern imagination.
