Of Heroes and Monsters: Good and Evil in Pop Culture. What makes a hero? How are their stories told? Are they descriptions of history, or just figments of our anxious prodding into the abyss of the world? Between myth, and history, we will study in this class various types of hero, and learn how theoretical works define heroic stories and analyze their place in literature. In this class, we will cover a wide-ranging number of genres and media, and a number of heroes from the Francophone world and beyond. From King Arthur to T’Challa, from Joan of Arc to Phileas Fogg, from Sky Woman to the Three Musketeers, this class will study different heroes and their portrayals to understand what traits make them heroes, and sometimes detour into portraits of villains, highlighting the proximity between heroes and villains—perhaps two sides of the same coin. In this class, you will learn to: analyze the different stages in a hero’s story, train to understand the symbols (animals or plants) that accompany heroes in stories, and become competent in the vocabulary needed to analyze images and films. To better prepare students for this work, we will study theoretical works in this class that in an effort to make this class accessible, most material will be online on the website as scans or e-reserves.