I’m putting together a 200-level course on death and immortality organized around genre. I want students to read a series of genres–elegy, revenge tragedy, Gothic, slave narrative, science fiction, historical fiction–each of which has its own investments in questions of death and the afterlife. In each unit, a fairly representative example of the given genre will be paired with something that pushes the boundaries of the genre to convey how fluid genres are. Here are some possible pairings:
“The Fall of the House of Usher” / Slade House
Hamlet / Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl / The Underground Railroad
Immortality, Inc. / Wild Seed
The Buried Giant / Lincoln in the Bardo
