ENGL 2635 - A Haunted House Divided: The American Gothic Tradition in Nineteenth-Century Literature

(crosslisted) AMST 2635
(ALC-AS, LA-AS, SCD-AS)

Fall or Spring. 4 credits. Student option grading.

This course counts toward the Literatures of the Americas and post-1800 requirements for English majors.

L. Warren.

This course looks at the American Gothic tradition as showing us the fissures in early American political life specifically around the issues of slavery and Native American land rights. While Gothic literature is often relegated to the role of entertainment, it also reveals the ways in which American culture was, as Toni Morrison writes in Playing in the Dark, “shaped by the presence of the racial other.” The Gothic also offers a space through which to offer not just clever observations but scathing critiques by augmenting the sense of the monstrous underlying grand sentiments of American Exceptionalism.