First-Year Research Seminar: The Everyday Gothic

Catalog description

We often associate the gothic with explicitly supernatural and sinister tropes: haunted castles, bloodthirsty vampires, gruesome deaths. But there are also subtler instances of the gothic that swarm our quotidian existence: the eerie message from a bot on our screens; the shady character on the subway staring intently; an elevator altercation that turns into a grotesque crime. How to think of such insidious forces that interrupt the flow of our mundane existence and perturb the ostensible safety of our routines? What are the economic, political, social, and cultural factors that shape our perception of these occurrences and our reactions to them? In this class, we will study the multifarious manifestations of the gothic and will consider it as a literary and cinematic mode of representation as well as a critical analytical tool. We will begin by reading canonical texts by Horace Walpole, Mary Shelley, and Edgar Allan Poe in order to develop a sophisticated understanding of the gothic as an aesthetic. We will then investigate our contemporary daily lives in order to detect, describe, and research pernicious gothic events, tensions, and subjectivities.