Old English writing article paper

Course Description

The occasion for this course stems from the sharp crystallization in the last few years of discourses of vilification and demonization in current state-based political platforms through which certain communities and social bodies are represented and mis-represented as monstrous, fearsome and villainous. To the untrained reader of discourse, these misrepresentations may seem casual, innocuous and entertaining, but it is important to understand the legacy of harm behind discourses of vilification and how they have been deployed in the past to wage cultural and political war against the people represented as vile. In this class we will study how peoples central to and yet marginalized by global processes of transformation are and have been consistently represented as monstrous, villainous and fearsome in various cultural media from the 17th Century to the present. We will ask how these cultural expressions relate to and respond to the particular global historical contexts out of which they emerge. Why were/are different populations represented as monstrous, fearsome or villainous? What were the historical and political conditions that made it so that people in power felt a need to represent these peoples in this way? How do images and discourses of the monstrous help powerful populations to maintain control over globalizing processes? And, finally, how have those who have been represented as villains responded to and/or resisted these representations?