Ghost Stories: Literary Hauntings and Specters of the Past

In the texts we will read in this course, hauntings—the spirits of the deceased invading and inhabiting physical spaces—provide often unwelcome and undesired opportunities for characters (and authors) to reckon with experiences and events thought long buried, but which refuse to be forgotten. Dismissed by modernity as mere superstition or fantasy, the ghosts which haunt our texts demand our attention, forcing us to question whether the present can ever be fully independent from the past. These literary specters will raise questions of history and memory, faith and belief, and assert that just as no ghost comes without a story behind it, no story comes without its own ghosts.