This class bites
Comparative Lit course e
In the basement of Bolton Hall, if you listen closely, you can hear the faint sound of screams, the pop of gunshots, and the hisses and snarls of a hungry horde of rotting corpses shambling closer and closer …. It’s not the zombie apocalypse. It’s just Wednesday in comparative literature. Drago Momcilovic, a senior lecturer in UWM’s comparative literature program, is in his second year of teaching CompLit 135, a variable-topics course. Momcilovic’s is titled, “Zombie Metaphors.” The class takes a deep look at zombies in popular culture and what our fascination with these monsters says about society. On the syllabus are cult classics and fan favorites, from old George Romero movies to AMC’s “The Walking Dead.” “Folk tales are filled with monsters,” Momcilovic said. “They get us to think about what a monster shows us and what a monster warns us about. Those are the two implicit functions of monstrosity, (and) the zombie is a really specific subset of monster that is very popular today.” The rise of zombie culture Though they’ve changed from decade to decade, zombies are generally recognized as reanimated corpses on the hunt for food – usually human brains. Those bitten by zombies are doomed to become one. The concept has its origins in Caribbean and specifically Haitian culture; the monster grew out of beliefs surrounding witch doctors who could render a victim apparently dead and revive them as a personal slave. The zombie has evolved since then and seems to be today’s monster of choice. “We had vampires when I was growing up in the ‘90s,” Momcilovic remembered. “But we ran the gamut of that, and zombies made an interesting comeback. You see these different iterations all around the world – Indonesia, the Balkans, even Argentina and Japan. They’re importing different stories from Romero and American masters and authenticating them in their own cultural vernacular.”
6 • IN FOCUS • October, 2019
What is driving society’s obsession with zombies these days? “The rise of computers,” he suggested. “The zombie virus and the computer virus are hand-in-hand in a lot of ways. They’ve evolved together and they’ve defamiliarized the way we interact with people. Zombies hoard together. They act as a collective, almost like a kind of network. So all of these Drago Momcilovic buzzwords like ‘network’ and ‘virus’ link these two tropes of infection.” Moreover, he added, today people fear a global pandemic. News about SARS and Ebola outbreaks mimic many of the ways fictional “zombie outbreaks” occur as well. The rise of the zombie class This is Momcilovic’s second year of teaching this class. He breaks the course into three units. The first deals with the popular American canon of zombie works, starting with Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” and other movies, and moving onto “The Walking Dead” and World War Z, a novel penned by author and actor Max Brooks, son of the comedian and director Mel Brooks. The second unit examines precursors to zombies – works like Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, for instance, or the 1932 film “The Mummy.” The third discusses zombies across the globe and how other cultures’ take on the monster echoes or differs from the American iteration, including the Japanese manga I Am a Hero by Kengo Hanazawa and the French television series “Les Revenants (The Returned.”) Really, the class is a sneaky way to teach critical and literary analysis.
