The goal of the seminar Darkening Vistas: New Approaches to American Gothic is to familiarize students with the extent to which the gothic sensibility underlies the American mind and examine various forms and functions of the genre. Our readings and discussions will embrace both the Gothic canon and its contemporary adaptations as well as revisions. The syllabus traces the elements of the bizarre, the ghostly and the uncanny from early masters of the tale of horror (Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ambrose Bierce) through gothic ventures undertaken by virtuosos of psychological realism (Henry James, Charlotte Perkins Gillman and Edith Wharton), early 20th century gothicists (H. P. Lovecraft, William Faulkner, Shirley Jackson), practitioners of Southern Gothic (Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers and Cormac McCarthy), to contemporary writers of ghost narratives (Marilynne Robinson, Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros, Coleson Whitehead, Philip Roth, George Saunders). We will look at the classics and their 20th and 21st century continuators through contemporary lens of affect studies, psychoanalysis, ecocriticism, and sociocultural studies.
- Nauczyciel: Paulina Ambroży