3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

We will trace the ancestry of some modern genres, pairing a modern book with a nineteenth-century counterpart. We will look at suspense fiction (Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley and Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities), romantic comedy (Anne Tyler's Accidental Tourist and a Jane Austen novel), science fiction (Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?—the basis for Blade Runner—and Wells’s The Time Machine) and tales of the fantastic (stories by John Cheever and Steven Milhauser paired with Poe and ​Hawthorne). A few films may be shown, but not during class.