Reading & Composition

Reading & Composition

Ghost Stories: Literary Hauntings and Specters of the Past
Course Number: 
R1B.005
Course Catalog Number: 
21476
Course Type or Level: 
Instructor: 
Kyle Ralston
Days: 
MWF
Time: 
3-4
Semester: 
Location: 
41 Evans

“124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children.”

These lines open Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a novel defined by its characters’ fraught relationship to the past. The house at 124 Bluestone Road is suffused with the echoes of a painful past: the angry ghost of a dead child haunts the house as the memories of living under slavery haunt its residents. In this spiteful, venomous house, Morrison’s characters live alongside unwelcome and unnatural reminders of past crimes and past suffering, which bind them at once to the space and to their shared history.

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.

This is a writing- and reading-intensive course. A substantial amount of time will be devoted to writing workshops and instruction as we develop our critical reading and analytical writing skills. Students will be required to actively participate in class discussion, read (and reread) carefully, and write papers with revisions, as well as complete a creative project related to the themes of the course.

Possible Texts:
Ghosts, Cesar Aira
The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen
“There Are More Things,” Jorge Luis Borges
“Etat présent: Hauntology, spectres and phantoms,” Colin Davis
A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
“The Unhomely,” Ghostland, Colin Dickey
“Ghosts” (Poem XXIX), Emily Dickinson
“A Rose for Emily,” William Faulkner
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
The House of Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne
Rebecca (film), Alfred Hitchcock

“The Deserted House,” E.T.A. Hoffmann
Poltergeist (film), Tobe Hooper
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Washington Irving
The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson
“The Dead,” James Joyce
The Babadook (film), Jennifer Kent
The Phantom of the Opera, Gaston Leroux
The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
Beloved, Toni Morrison
The Eye, Vladimir Nabokov
Myth(s) of Orpheus and Eurydice, Metamorphoses X.1-85, Ovid & Georgics IV.453-527, Vergil
“The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins
Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton, Edith Wharton
“The Canterville Ghost,” Oscar Wilde