Lovecraft

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Lovecraft Love Update

October 24, 2008 in Uncategorized | 4 comments

I received an email back from the professor teaching the course in supernatural literature.  She said that while Lovecraft is not on the syllabus for the spring section, he’ll probably be part of future courses.  The prof noted his place in supernatual and horror literature and said that no one was really tackling the genre as a whole very well (at least at my university).

So, say there was a course on Lovecraft (or anything else you enjoy in a totally non-academic or overly intellectualized way — comic books, early 1990′s music, role playing games, whatever).  Would you take it?  I ask because part of me is wary of over-intellectualizing or academicizing certain things, be they elements of popular culture or just things that are fun for me.  That waryness stems from the fact that I tend to intellectualize everything to some degree and sometimes wish I didn’t.  Taking a class on comic books wouldn’t help that tendency.

Lack of Lovecraft Love?

October 23, 2008 in Education | 2 comments

Like most universities, we have an English lit course that’s geared toward meeting the lit requirement for non-majors.  Most of my early childhood majors take it.  One thing I like about the way the English department runs the course is that they give professors considerable latitude in the course’s theme.  I’ve seen the course focused on sci-fi and Harry Potter.  Next semester, there’s even a section of the course that focuses on Paris in the Jazz age that features a spring break trip to Paris, where I assume the students will hang around Shakespeare’s Daughter and be tutored by crochety old women writers.  And, yes, I am jealous I don’t get to teach courses like that.

Also in the spring, one section of the course is titled “The Supernatural in Literature”.  It focuses on the late 19th through the 21st century.  Authors to be read include Poe, James, Wilde, William Peter Blatty, and some folks I have never really heard of, like Scott Ely and Eion Colfin.  One thing that immediately jumped out at me was ‘Where’s Lovecraft?”  This wasn’t an indignant jump; I am not one of those folks who spends their time arguing for Lovecraft’s proper place in the American Canon.  First, I am not really sure he belongs there.  Second, I don’t know Lovecraft’s corpus well enough to aruge stringently one way or the  other.  I was just curious that an author whose entire body of work was spent exploring humanity’s place in the universe through stories about VERY supernatural encounters isn’t part of the course.  I understand that you can’t include everything; like I said, I am just curious.

I sent an email to the professor teaching the course; I hope it’s taken as a curious inquiry and not as some assault on her course structure.  We professors can be prickly, after all.