Monsters & Other Weird Things are Subjects of Study

If the scariest things about classes this fall are term papers and pop quizzes, and pumpkin carving is too tame for you, consider what some Knox students are studying during the week before Halloween:

• Studying a Monster—Students in English Literature 251 are reading and discussing an important but obscure tragedy from the 1600s, The Duchess of Malfi, which features a character who suffers from lycanthropia -- believing that he is a wolf.
• Creating Monsters—About 50 students, divided into three groups, are taking a First-year Preceptorial (FP) course, Creating Monsters. This week, they're studying Fritz Lang's uber-creepy serial killer film M.

The English Literature class examining The Duchess of Malfi is taught by Valerie Billing, assistant professor of English. One of the characters, Ferdinand, conspires to kill his sister, and is a key figure in a circle of death and cruelty that also leads to the murder of his sister's children and his brother.

"Ferdinand mentally tortures his sister, and then as soon as she's dead, he starts to embody the monstrousness that he's been exhibiting throughout the play. That's when he starts this transformation, thinking that he's a wolf," Billing says. "We're told that he's been in the graveyard digging up bodies, because that's what people in Renaissance England believed that wolves did."

The focus of the Creating Monsters FP class for the week ahead of Halloween is "Criminals As Monsters."

"We'll be viewing and discussing the 1931 film M," said Brandon Polite, assistant professor of philosophy, who's teaching one of the three FP sections alongside Judy Thorn, professor of biology, and Fernando Gomez, associate professor of modern languages-Spanish. The classic thriller stars Peter Lorre as a serial predator who murders young girls.

"This will follow our discussion of the false idea of Blackness as a 'signal' of criminality (i.e., monstrosity)," Polite said. "We're looking at this racial prejudice, particularly the idea of the Black man as super-predator, both through literature that we've read earlier in the course, such as Shakespeare's Othello, and what we have read in today's news media about last year's killing of Michael Brown, who was described by the police officer who killed him almost as a giant who 'look[ed] like a demon.'"

"By studying monsters," adds Gomez, "our goal is to learn of the rhetoric associated with it, which allows us to identify it when it is applied to human beings, recognize its divisive and inhumane consequences, and then combat it with more scientific language that encourages critical thinking, deeper knowledge of the subject at hand, and humanity."

Above: Characters from the Knox College performance of The Skriker; below: English students fill up on Halloween candy, evil wizard haunts Knox production of The Green Bird, theatre department prop storage room is just plain creepy