The Weird and the Eerie

”What the weird and the eerie have in common is a preoccupation with the strange. The strange — not the horrific. The allure that the weird and the eerie possess is not captured by the idea that we ’enjoy what scares us’. It has, rather, to do with a fascination for the outside, for that which lies beyond standard perception, cognition and experience.” Mark Fisher – The Weird and the Eerie. The new millenium has seen a flourishing of texts, both literary and cultural, which evince these two modes (or moods). This course will examine a variety of them, as well as older texts, to investigate what it is that distinguishes the weird and the eerie from the strange, the uncanny, the fantastic, and the gothic.

Among the works to be studied are Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea, Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, and Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now.

The assessment will be a presentation and a term paper.