ENG 271 Online via Laulima
Summer II 2017: 07/03-08/11/17 (CRN 91996, Section 702)
Introduction to Literature: Genre
The Fantastic Film
WRITING INTENSIVE SECTION
Instructor: Ida Yoshinaga (ida@hawaii.edu), ABD and MA, English, UHM Creative Writing Program
DESCRIPTION:
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 the same as fantasy-genre 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, we’ll 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?
GRADING REQUIREMENTS:
2 exams, 3 short papers, 1 PowerPoint essay, informal Discussion Board posts, participation
REQUIRED TEXTS:
– Greenhill, Pauline, and Sydney Eve Matrix, Editors. Fairy Tale Films: Visions of Ambiguity [Free online]. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2010.
– David Butler, Fantasy Cinema: Impossible Worlds Onscreen, Short Cuts series, Wallflower Press, ISBN 978-1906660161.
– Access to Laulima course website where the Resources folder will contain URLs and PDFs for accessing other readings about fantastic storytelling and cinema.
– Access to Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, or another streaming or DVD/Blu-Ray purchasing service, that allows viewing of various fantasy, science fiction, and fairy tale films and other fantastic texts, titles TBA.