ENGL231

Humanities (HU), Global Perspectives (GP)

The dismemberments, squeaking ghosts, and poisoned pharmacies of literary revenges never cease to thrill and disgust audiences with their bittersweet paradoxes. How can we distinguish revengers from villains if their killings are virtually identical? Why does the sober promise of an eye-for-an-eye requital of one body for another become a frenzied massacre of innocents and not-so-innocents? Can justice ever be restored by going outside the law, or a lost past ever be re-found in a sordid present? In this course, we consider some of the central paradoxes and themes of revenge by reading radically-different writers from the first to twenty-first centuries, including Seneca, Shakespeare, Stephen King, and Gillian Flynn. All the while, we watch classic revenge flicks to explore how directors from Tarantino to Park Chan-wook translate these narratives onto the screen. Throughout, we examine the ever-changing meanings of revenge across culture and time. No prerequisites.