“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 is.” -Toni Morrison

As Morrison suggests, America, a nation self-heralded for its optimistic visions of seemingly never ending possibility, is yet haunted by the violent past that promoted its greatness. The ghosts of the past lurk in every dark corner of its literature—an indication of anxiety and repressed guilt that emerge as the foil to American conscience. This quarter we will face these demons (or specters, bugaboos, and bloodthirsty savages) in order to better understand why they constantly reemerge, throwing a wrench in our nationalistic machinery, fueled by American exceptionalism and denial. Our literary travels will take us from the frontier to the plantation, the sitting parlor, and back onto the streets of America’s great cities before embarking on a foray into the mind, showing that no space—whether geographical, psychological, biological, or temporal—is safe from these “hauntings.” No doubt these so called “ghost stories” still speak to our anxieties as well today as they did at the times of their inceptions, begging the question of how much America’s agenda has truly changed in the past four hundred years.

Our reading will cover a variety of (pared-down) historical and theoretical texts in order to provide context for literature spanning the period of European settlement to the present. We will sample a small handful of novels and a significantly larger selection of short stories by authors including: Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ambrose Bierce, Edith Wharton, Henry James, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, William Faulkner, and Toni Morrison. The following texts will be available through the University Bookstore: Billy Budd and Other Stories, The Turn of the Screw, Absalom, Absalom!, and Beloved. Additionally, a course pack will be available at Professional Copy located on University Way.

Course requirements: The final grade will be based on regular contribution to class discussion, several writing assignments, and the final exam. As this is a “W” course, writing will play a key role in analyzing the assigned literature. Each student will be required to write two response papers (3-4 pages in length each), one major essay (5-7 pages), as well as mandatory revisions.