Untangle the challenging form of fantastic cinema…
ENG 271: Introduction to Literature – The Fantastic Film
Summer Session I 2018 (fully online)
Sec. 601, CRN 96420
What is a fantastic film: how does it differ, for instance, from the “literatures of the fantastic”–including print-literary fairy tales, speculative fiction (aka “sf”) novels, Gothic-descended horror stories, and other wonder-genre tales in writing? Is it movies such as The Lord of the Rings trilogy or the urban-fantasy animated works of Miyazaki Hayao? Is it simply about magic and wizards – or can it be any cinematic text that gives you a feeling of weirdness, awe, terror?
We will attempt to answer these questions as we collaboratively untangle the contested, boundary-challenging, often colonialistic form of fantastic cinema, paying special attention to how movies and other audio-visual narratives depict issues of gender-sexuality, race-indigeneity, social class, globalization, religion-spirituality, and regional community. In the process, weʻll ask two basic questions: What are the stakes of the fantasy genre, and how does one write critically about fantastic consciousness, as portrayed via the movie form?
Required text: – David Butler, Fantasy Cinema: Impossible Worlds Onscreen, Short Cuts series, Wallflower Press, 2010. ISBN 978-1906660161.
Course requirements: 2 exams, 3 short papers, 1 PowerPoint essay, informal Discussion Board posts, and participation.
Fulfills the general education requirement: DL, NI, WI
About the Instructor
Ida Yoshinaga is a Ph.D. student in the Department of English who specializes in screenwriting studies, feminist film theory, and decolonial approaches to the fantastic genre. She won the Abernethy Award, the top creative award in the UHM Creative Writing Program; the Walter James Miller Award for Scholarship in the International Fantastic from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts; and the R.D. Mullen Fellowship of Science Fiction Studies journal.
For inquiries about the course, email ida@hawaii.edu.