ENGL 12008 - The Gothic Imagination

Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
The Gothic is generally linked in people’s imagination to B movies, trashy novels, and mournful teenagers. But the genre has its roots in canonical literature of the late 18th and 19th century: the sublime geographies and alienated individuals of the Romantic era. Today, the Gothic has mutated across a range of media and connects literary and cultural studies. While establishing central tropes of the genre (including the Gothic monster both technological and psychological, dark secrets, mysterious doubles, the nature of evil, and the relationship between human and nature) we will examine the ways these wild stories of death, despair, doubles, degeneration and desire helped readers to forge national identities, negotiate the territory between Self and Other, and conceptualize the relationships among humans, nature, and technology. Readings range from 18th and 19th century literature through contemporary news accounts, advertisements, film, and television; authors will be mostly 19th century British, but will include some Americans and Latin Americans as well (examples: Walpole, Radcliffe, Byron, Mary Shelley, Austen, Stoker, Poe, Garcia Marquez, Benitez Rojo, Ferre and Ocampo). At the end of the course, you will prove your mastery of the genre by creating your own Gothic text. [AH]