Writing Our Monsters [Sara Brickman]

All Levels | Half-humans, Frankensteins, and creatures of the deep are frames for looking at our own humanity. Yet writers and institutions have also used monstrosity to uphold hierarchies and push others to the margins. Using examples from television and writers like Anne Carson and Octavia Butler, we’ll wrestle with texts that trouble the line between literary and genre, and look closely at how these writers intersect with real-world constructions of monstrosity. And we’ll generate our own work in relationship to monster-dom that defies convention and redraws the lines of “normal.”