ENC 1145: Topics for Composition |
"Horror For Children" University of Florida
Semester: Fall 2015
Section: 3312 Class Meetings: MWF Period 3 For many children, there is an undeniable attraction to the strange, dark, and terrifying. The question is why. Is it simply the taboo of it? Wanting to experience something that their parents have denied them? Or is this issue, if we can even call it that, more complex? One theory put forward is that scary media provides children with an outlet for safely confronting their anxieties - anxieties that are generally ignored by adults under the assumption that children are too innocent to understand the darker realities of life. And yet popular children’s literature grapples with dark themes and topics just as often as works for adults do.
In this course, we will be surveying a number of “scary” texts (books, games, films, etc.) for children, both texts that deal with dark subject matter and actual horror media that is geared at children. Themes examined in this course may include trauma, abuse, death, abandonment, sexual endangerment, monstrosity, loss of identity, and more. By engaging with these texts and themes through a number of different critical lenses, students will arrive at a better understanding of the social functions that children’s literature and horror serve as genres, as well as grapple with important literary issues such as audience, censorship, and the flexibility of genre. Writing assignments in this course will be experimental and creative and will require students to engage with a number of digital platforms and methods of production. Assignments will include a reflective blog, a class wiki, a mixed tape, a film review, and an online class anthology that will be built using original scary stories for children composed by the students. |
INSTRUCTOR CONTACT INFORMATION:
Office Location: Turlington 4323 Office Hours: Wednesday Periods 7 & 8 or by appointment Email: [email protected] TEXTBOOKS:
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