Syllabus 2026-27

Week 1: Introduction

Stories: Algernon Blackwood, “The Willows” (1907); Okamoto Kidō, “Sea Turtles” (1934); China Miéville, “Covehithe” (2011)

Benjamin Noys and Timothy S. Murphy, “Introduction: Old and New Weird,” Genre (2016) 49 (2): 117–134

Andrew Smith and Timothy Hughes, “Introduction: Defining the Ecogothic,” Ecogothic (Manchester University Press, 2013): 1-14

Week 2:

Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle [1962] (Penguin, 2009)

Mark Fisher, “The Weird and the Eerie: Beyond the Unheimlich,” “The Out of Place and the Out of Time: Lovecraft and the Weird,” “Approaching the Eerie,” from The Weird and the Eerie (Repeater, 2016)

Nicole Seymour, “Locating Queer Ecologies,” Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination (University of Illinois Press, 2013)

Week 3

Marlen Haushofer, The Wall [1963], trans. Shaun Whiteside (Quartet, 2013)

Derek Jarman, “1989: January-March,” “1989: August-September,” “1990: March-April,” from Modern Nature (Vintage, 2018)

Week 4

Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead [2009], trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Fitzcarraldo, 2018)

Ed Yong, “The Only True Voyage,” from An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us (Vintage, 2023)

Week 5

Jenny Hval, Paradise Rot: A Novella, trans. Marjam Idriss (Verso, 2018)

Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny” (1919)

Week 6: Reading week

Week 7

Jeff Vandermeer, Annihilation (Fourth Estate, 2015)

Merlin Sheldrake, “What Is It Like to Be a Fungus?” “The Intimacy of Strangers,” “Mycelial Minds,” from Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures (Vintage, 2021)

Week 8

Eka Kurniawan, Kitchen Curse: Stories, trans. Annie Tucker et al. (Verso, 2019)

Fred Botting and Justin D. Edwards, “Theorising Globalgothic,” Globalgothic, ed. Glennis Byron (Manchester University Press, 2016): 11-24

Week 9

Rita Indiana, Tentacle, trans. Achy Obejas (And Other Stories, 2018)

The Salvage Collective, The Tragedy of the Worker: Towards the Proletarocene (Verso, 2021)

Week 10

Fernanda Trías, Pink Slime, trans. Heather Cleary (Scribe, 2023)

Orlando Bentancor, “Weird Nature: Abstraction, Horror, and Capitalism in Latin American Speculative Fiction,” Mediations 36.1 (Spring 2024): 100-121