Haunted America

Catalog description

This course explores the way in which trauma and historical memory shape culture in America. We will trace the ways in which the past has been repressed and the ways in which it returns with a vengeance, often as a haunted narrative or a narrative about haunting. The inability to escape the past or, conversely, the willingness to remember it accurately, creates legacies of violence, alienation, and madness. Using cultural artifacts from a number of different genres and disciplines, we'll work to resurrect and exorcise these "ghosts," giving them bodies and voices. "Haunted America" explores the representation of witches, ghosts, monsters, and fatal men and women in American history, politics, and culture. Often these same characters-created as representations of fear, or as vehicles of political oppression and scapegoating-become, finally, icons of resistance and empowerment. We will explore this topic through a number of literary and visual texts: in the short fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Edgar Allan Poe; the poetry of Emily Dickinson; the films of John Ford and Jordon Peele; and in films such as Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca or Mary Harron's Netflix adaptation of Alias Grace. America has often been described as a new world, a land without ghosts; "Haunted America" rejects this myth. Senior standing required.