Topic: American Gothic
| Time | Days | Location | Instructor | GER | Credit | OPUS Class Number | Syllabus (Tentative) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
10:40am-11:30am | MWF | Tarbutton Hall 106 | Barbara Ladd. | HAPW. | 4 | 2802 | TBA. |
Content: “For a people who made much of their ‘newness’—their potential, freedom, and innocence—it is striking how dour, how troubled, how frightened and haunted our early and founding literature truly is” (Toni Morrison). Decaying mansions, ancestral curses, haunted places—Gothic is the literature of terror, and it remains one of the signature modes of American fiction. In this course, we will consider the forms, preoccupations, and uses of the gothic in American literature. Although our focus will be on American writing, we will begin the course with the first gothic romance, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764).
Work: quizzes/reaction papers; midterm and final exam; 2 reviews of scholarship; research paper.
Texts: Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto. Charles Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn; Edgar Allan Poe, selected stories and poems; Nathaniel Hawthorne, selected stories; Herman Melville, “Benito Cereno”; Henry James, The Turn of the Screw; George W. Cable, “The Haunted House in Royal Street”; Charles Chesnutt, selected stories; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”; Dorothy Scarborough, The Wind; William Faulkner, Sanctuary; Cormac McCarthy, Child of God; Toni Morrison, Beloved.
The schedule of courses on O.P.U.S. is the official listing of courses, including days and times they meet and the General Education Requirements they satisfy. Students should use course descriptions as general guidelines. Course requirements, grading details, book lists, and syllabi are subject to change.