The Speculative Turn hits Notre Dame

From their course offering for next year:

ENGL 90721
The American Novel and the Speculative Turn
Kate Marshall
Monday 3:00-5:45

The focus of this course will be the constellation of questions that have emerged under the theoretical umbrella of “the speculative turn” in the humanities. We will examine examples of such thought including speculative realism, object-oriented ontologies, and dark ecology from the point of view of narrative fiction, and ask what key texts from the American literary tradition might contribute to such debates.

At the heart of our literary study will be the recent international literary movement of “New Weird Fiction” and its correspondences with the cultural productions of what Greil Marcus has referred to in another context as “Old, Weird America.” The range of fictions, therefore, will travel from Melville to Miéville by way of H. P. Lovecraft.