American Gothic

Catalog description

Emerging from the swamps of desire and the muck of history, dripping in horror and high camp, Gothic literature is paradigmatic in the imagination of the US South. An extremely popular and influential genre, Gothic literature also reveals the discursive contortions and deceptions that characterize the persistent resistance to a full reckoning with American history. Literary scholarship reads grotesque elements of literature as a symbolic “return of the repressed,” as the buried histories of racial and patriarchal violence having their revenge. This course traces the trajectory of the Gothic literary genre from its origins in the 19th century, through its canonical works in the twentieth century, and up to its recent incarnations. Breaking out of the established canon of the Southern Gothic, this course recenters US literary history around the Caribbean. Students will use the terms of postcoloniality to investigate how the historical conditions of the southern US colonies (and later states) were both similar and different to conditions in the Caribbean and other parts of North America, producing linked but distinct versions of the Gothic genre. The Gothic mode provides a model to study the relationship between history and art more generally. How do the insights of the Gothic genre allow us to analyze violence, memory, and writing in other places and disciplines? Readings from Nathaniel Hawthorne, Silvia Federici, Edgar Allan Poe, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, Gabriel García Márquez, Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams, Carmen Maria Machado, Shani Mootoo, Paul Gilroy, Sylvia Wynter, Aimé Césaire, and Édouard Glissant.