Topics in the Literature of American Cultures

A good ghost story is never just about an apparition. It’s about the society that created that ghost, and what such a society fears: race relations, changing gender roles, disease, technology, foreignness.  Indeed, the thing that makes gothic writing so compelling, says Edith Wharton, is its ability to both explore and obscure the “unspeakable” — that real-life social anxiety hiding in the symbolic backdrop of the paranormal tale.

This class will use two centuries of American gothic writing and film, from Edgar Allen Poe to Toni Morrison to Fight Club, as a lens through which to identify and unpack cultural problematics of race, gender, and class at various moments in U.S. history.  Combining literary close reading with historical non-fiction for background, we will investigate how much tales of the most unreal (monsters, spirits, otherworldly madness) can teach us about our social reality.