Cirrus@Austlit

This unit invites students to analyse popular genres such as horror, crime, autobiography, science fiction, and romance. Storytelling is a fundamental means through which humans make sense of the world, and genres provide common templates for story-telling and meaning-making. This unit will investigate the origins of genres and their revision across time, highlighting how genre stories are involved in cultural struggles over meaning. The unit will take a historical and comparative approach, but it will also introduce students to relevant interdisciplinary fields such as gender studies and media studies. Encompassing novels, films, poetry, comics, and interactive digital narratives, set texts include Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Kelly Sue DeConnick’s and Valentine de Landro’s Bitch Planet, and The Fullbright Company’s Gone Home. Students will write their own piece of genre fiction, as well as undertaking a multimedia presentation and a critical essay exploring genre and its revisions.