Masterpieces of the Imaginative Mind: Literature’s Most Fantastic Works

Course No. 2997 (24 lectures, 30 minutes/lecture)
Taught by Eric S. Rabkin
University of Michigan
Ph.D., University of Iowa
1. The Brothers Grimm & Fairy Tale Psychology
2. Propp, Structure, and Cultural Identity
3. Hoffmann and the Theory of the Fantastic
4. Poe—Genres and Degrees of the Fantastic
5. Lewis Carroll: Puzzles, Language, & Audience
6. H. G. Wells: We Are All Talking Animals
7. Franz Kafka—Dashed Fantasies
8. Woolf—Fantastic Feminism & Periods of Art
9. Robbe-Grillet, Experimental Fiction & Myth
10. Tolkien & Mass Production of the Fantastic
11. Children’s Literature and the Fantastic
12. Postmodernism and the Fantastic
13. Defining Science Fiction
14. Mary Shelley—Grandmother of Science Fiction
15. Hawthorne, Poe, and the Eden Complex
16. Jules Verne and the Robinsonade
17. Wells—Industrialization of the Fantastic
18. The History of Utopia
19. Science Fiction and Religion
20. Pulp Fiction, Bradbury, & the American Myth
21. Robert A. Heinlein—He Mapped the Future
22. Asimov and Clarke—Cousins in Utopia
23. Ursula K. Le Guin: Transhuman Anthropologist
24. Cyberpunk, Postmodernism, and Beyond