ENGL 374 - King and Kubrick

FDR: HL
Credits: 3

Prerequisite: Take one English course between 201 and 295, and one between 222 and 299. This course explores and juxtaposes the novels, films, epic ambitions, dark visions, and cultural rivalry of two of the most popular, influential, and original narrative artists of 20th- and 21st-century America. We survey all of Kubrick’s 13 feature films, more closely engage with several of the most important, and highlight a small but representative selection of King’s vast oeuvre, emphasizing King’s literary and cultural ambitions more than his practice as a master of horror. At the center stand King’s and Kubrick’s versions of The Shining and the angry reaction of King to Kubrick’s cold, dark, even post-human adaptation of the far more ethical and humane novel. This rivalry and argument becomes the lens through which this course takes up the larger debate over the modernist and postmodernist cultural ranking of works and authors into categories such ”masscult” and “midcult” or “highbrow,” “middlebrow,” and “lowbrow.” Adams.