From True Blood to The Walking Dead, from American Horror Story to Celebrity Ghost Stories, contemporary television is populated by vampires, zombies, and specters of the undead. Meanwhile, as “mature” audiences await the next season of Dexter, the young-adult demographic graduates from the dark wizardry of the Harry Potter series to the mortal combat of The Hunger Games. For critics like Noel Carroll, the current popularity of horror in this “postmodern” age can be attributed to the fact that both horror and postmodernism stand in the same shifting and unstable relationship to empirical, rational knowledge. This class will attempt to further make sense of our contemporary obsession with supernatural terror by surveying a number of the genre’s earlier, canonical texts, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. These novels and novellas will be accompanied by a course pack of short fiction and critical essays by Carroll, Susan Stewart, and others.

Students will be responsible for writing a short 4 page essay on an assigned reading, and for giving an in-class presentation on the contents of that essay. In order to satisfy the “W” requirement, students must also complete one 10-12 page essay, which must be revised in response to feedback from the instructor. Other class requirements include a midterm exam, daily participation in class discussions, and occasional quizzes on the reading material.