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Tired of the same old mythology?  Polish up your classical mythology while at the same time sampling the mythology of the coming millennium. We will begin in ancient Greece with a reading of Aeschylus' great drama, The Oresteia, a mythological vision of one family's encounter with uncanny spirits of vengeance. We will proceed from there to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a modern example of a similar mythology, this time expressed in the rhetoric of a Gothic novel. Our journey will culminate in William Gibson's Count Zero, a novel written in the neo-Gothic Sci-Fi genre of Cyberpunk: a genre that reinterprets the cyberspace of the Internet as a mythological domain of more than natural beings (Vodoun Loas) and occurrences. We will consider how both of these novels appropriate the language of the cutting edge science of their day for an expression of mythological perils of the soul very similar to those that we see in Aeschylus. Our readings will also include accounts of the extreme states of consciousness revealed in the visions of mystics such as Black Elk and Saint Teresa. Our final novel will be accompanied by brief accounts of contemporary Haitian religious practises and beliefs. * IN-CLASS FILMS * There will be in-class screenings of classic sci-fi and horror films, specifically: Hitchcock's Psycho, (Original version--Th 7/1),  Herzog's Nosferatu  (Th 7/14), Ridley Scott's Blade Runner,  a tale set in 21st century LA (Th 7/29) and Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (Tu 8/10), a darkly comic account of nuclear Armageddon from the 1950s.     * POPULAR CULTURE * Throughout the course of the semester, we will comb the far reaches of the imagination for contemporary accounts of weird, uncanny and inexplicable events. Our readings of our three major literary works will be abetted by an investigation of emerging millennial mythology in folklore concerning fate, the afterlife, eternal life, furies, demigods, goblins, Vampires, droids, clones, hybrids, weird science, rogue scientists, UFOs and other such wanderers of the night. Some of this material will be presented in course readers.       WORLD WIDE WEB * Since we aim to chronicle the persistence of the mythological vision from antiquity to the culture of the present moment, our studies will eventually (hopefully sooner rather than later) take us into cyberspace and the media of the emerging millennium: the Internet and the World Wide Web. Students will be asked to do informal web searches  for--and informal class presentations on--specimens of popular discourses such as Urban Legends, UFO lore, conspiracy theories and the like. Those without easy computer access will be asked to look for such folklore in more traditional sources such as libraries, interviews with family or friends or in mass culture venues such as the X-Files, print and television advertising, supermarket tabloids and similar media.  Some questions we may consider: How do the metaphors of popular science writing pick up the cosmogonic imagery of mythology? On the other hand, do the uncanny figures of Vampires, UFOnauts, conspiracy theories, etc. currently crowding the margins of popular epistemology bear comparison to the personae of the classical mythology? How do the Gothic productions of the entertainment industry ("X-files," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," "Deep Impact," "Matrix" etc.) mediate between the normal, positive more or less scientific vision of the late 20th-century and the alternative world view of the "fringe" beliefs that find such ready expression on the Internet? What is the popular fascination with beliefs that are so roundly disavowed by the hard facts of the mainstream, officially sanctioned skeptical common sense?      HOME PAGE - JohnPaulin.com Return to Teaching