Reading & Composition

Reading & Composition

The Unhomely
Course Number: 
R1B.001
Course Catalog Number: 
21461
Course Type or Level: 
Instructor: 
Dinah Lensing-Sharp
Days: 
MWF
Time: 
12-1
Semester: 
Location: 
Remote

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and
katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding
darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.”

- Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (1959)

What’s most frightening about Hill House isn’t the mysterious darkness within, but the house’s utter refusal to be a home. The expectation that four walls and a roof should welcome and protect its inhabitants is instead turned on its head as the menacing structure slowly drives its guests mad. Like many tales of haunted houses, Jackson’s classic horror novel shows the more sinister side of traditional notions of the home. On the one hand, the home should provide a sense of warmth and stability; on the other, the demand for perfection in the home may confine or even suffocate the homemakers - that is, traditionally, the women - expected to maintain such comforts.

In transforming what is often thought to be a symbol of safety and stability into a source of terror and trauma, such stories shine a harsh light on literature’s uncanny ability to render even the most familiar objects of life disorienting and unrecognizable. While not all of our texts will derive horror from domestic confinement or oppressive gender norms, together they will force us to reconsider our assumptions and expectations of homes and their role in everyday life. Reading these texts closely and connecting them to the works of various thinkers and theorists, as a class we will explore the power of rendering the everyday strange again and see what unexpected ideas then emerge from beneath its once-familiar surface.

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.
Course Texts & Films:
● “I years had been from home,” Emily Dickinson
● “The Uncanny,” Sigmund Freud
● “The Sandman,” E.T.A. Hoffmann
● “The Venus of Ille,” Prosper Mérimée
● “Le Horla,” Guy de Maupassant
● The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
● “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman
● The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson
● To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
● Oedipus Rex, Sophocles
● Vertigo, dir. Alfred Hitchcock
● The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
● Us, dir. Jordan Peele