Department of English

“Where’s Papa going with that ax?”

So begins Charlotte’s Web, one of the most beloved children’s novels of all time. “If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book” is the good start to The Bad Beginning in a literal Series of Unfortunate Events. Did you know that a hundred years before the Brothers Grimm, in the first popular version of “Little Red Riding Hood”, the girl doesn’t get out from the inside of the wolf? That Dracula was predated by twenty-five years by a girl vampire who bit her way through several European countries and countless readers' imaginations? How ‘bout that The Hunger Games is based on ancient Greek mythology? Yeah, you probably knew that one.

In this course, we’re going to discuss the Grimm and the grimmer. And the occasional heavenly creature. We are exploring when death creates a second life. The dead might be feared (like the ghost and the vampire). Or revered (the little angel, the Disney mom, the Dead Girl). Or cancelled (like They-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named artists, novelists, and social media supernovas). We will examine materials ranging from classic fairy tales to children’s picture books to Shakespeare’s plays, E.B.White to Reina Telgemeier to Jason Reynolds. Netflix, Instagram, TikTok. In the end (or is it the end?), perhaps we will have come to conclusions about where literary death and life meet. Or maybe we’ll just be sleeping with the lights on. Assignments include weekly check-ins, two short papers, a deadly presentation, and a terminal project of either critical analysis of your course study or a creative representation of where that study has taken you at its close. 

Come see what happens with that ax.