The Undead: Revenance in Literature and

Zombies are everywhere. All over literature, film, and television. To be fair, zombies have been cinematically popular since 1932, but they are really having a moment right now. Moreover, whereas lots of zombie films in the 80s and 90s were low-brow and shlocky, the zombie genre—in both film and TV—has recently made a name for itself as an elite, highly philosophical, and often highly moving genre. So what’s the story? How and why did that happen? Why are zombies so hot right now? Why are major television studios pouring money into megaseries like The Last of Us or The Walking Dead?            

In this class, we will examine the history of the literature and cinema of the undead. By “undead” we will mean embodied revenants who come back to some kind of life or simulacrum of life after death. So, no ghosts, but lots of zombies, ghouls, draugar, vampires, and some cyborgs. Through these revenants and undead “monsters,” writers and filmmakers have asked questions about what it means to be a person, who gets to claim the status of a “human,” and what it says about our relationship to the past, present, and future that the dead keep on rising from their graves. As we’ll see, the zombie genre is extremely varied and internally diverse, but it has been, for as long as it has existed, an important genre for thinking through forms of inequality, violence, dehumanization, and existential dread.

I warn you: there is material on this syllabus that is revolting in many different ways. So buckle your seatbelt. If you’re not up for some serious gore, some very offensive ideas, and some troubling philosophies, you may want to take another class.