Literature & Culture: American Gothic

Catalog description

This course will explore American culture and history as a fundamentally haunted space. Beginning with Puritan anxieties about a new world, and their occasionally savage response to it, we will analyze the way in which American artists embody, expose and sometimes attempt to exorcise the fears of a nation. We will also experience the work of authors who use the Gothic strategically to express all sorts of repressed or impending revolutions and acts of revenge. Finally, the class will read narratives and autobiographies written by Americans whose lives were in themselves stories of horror and monstrosity.