The gothic is a fascinating and recurring mode in American literature. It appears early and returns like the repressed, each time in a slightly different form and yet in each instance doing what the gothic does best: unveiling the haunted and haunting unconscious, unearthing the uncanny ghosts of America’s particular cultural past. As we’ll see, these texts evoke the bloody colonial expansion as compellingly as they mark the anxieties over the sexual, confront the disavowed heritage of racial conflicts and scrape the underbelly of religious imagination. For this reason, a sustained study of the American gothic allows us to consider both literary and cultural history at the same time, showing us how the two are distinct yet connected. As we carry out our investigation, we will make contact with many other traditions in American writing, including Puritan historiography, Enlightenment romance, transnational folk tales, Protestant hymnology, realist and modernist narrative, and contemporary experimental poetries.

This class will demand hard thinking and a critical imagination. Active participation in class discussion will be mandatory. Along with weekly in-class writing, students will compose three short response papers and a final 6-8 page critical essay.

Required Texts:
Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntley. Hackett. ISBN 978-0872208537
Nathanial Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables. Norton. 2nd Ed. ISBN 978-0393924763
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! Vintage. ISBN 978-0679732181
C. D. Wright, Deepstep Come Shining. Copper Canyon Press. ISBN 978-1556590924
A course pack will contain selections from William Bradford, Anne Bradstreet, Washington Irving, Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, and secondary material.