This course will use seven of Edgar Allan Poe’s best-known tales of terror adapted into films as our main objects of study: “The Raven” (1845); “The Conqueror Worm” (1843); “The Black Cat” (1843); “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839); “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843); “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846); “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842).
While we will hopefully all learn something new about Poe and his work in the process, this is not a course on Edgar Allan Poe per se. Rather, the main purpose of the course is to explore how scholars and filmmakers have interpreted the material to reveal aspects of the author and his oeuvre that might not be obvious at first glance. While scholars and filmmakers use different modes of address to convey their interpretations, both seek to offer innovative readings of Poe and his texts to shed a new light on his well-known stories.
This is the purpose of research in Humanities disciplines like English: to foster original and cogent understandings of oeuvres, artists and their contexts not only to better appreciate a specific object of study, but also and more broadly to improve our comprehension of how the human condition has been, and continues to be, depicted through creative expression.
This course will cover three broad research approaches that are typical to Humanities disciplines: Contextual, Theoretical and Critical.
- Teacher: Andre Loiselle