This course is built around the twin themes of investigation and the unheimlich, or “uncanny”–and  how tales of haunted houses, ghost stories, and strange fictions often serve as a stand-in for that which is unknowable, or unspeakable. In these stories, the only way to see something clearly is often to look at it sideways–and in so doing, of letting go of the self-assured hubris that comes with the ability to empirically categorize the world around you.

Beginning with the foundation given to us by the Victorian Gothic, we will move on to themes of generational trauma, colonial violence, chronic  illness, liminal spaces, the return of the repressed, toxic shame, the terrors peculiar to childhood, and the monstrous banality of evil. Tales of hauntings, folklore, hidden doorways, family secrets, and histories of violence–whose disavowal only serves to make them ever-present–serve as the foundation for the texts we will examine in this course, read alongside a longer history of ideas from thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva, Mark Fisher, and others who have attempted to put a language and a concept to those feelings of creeping unease (and dreadful familiarity) that come from  those peculiar sorts of recurrent nightmares that–if one dreams too long, and too deep–being to feel more real than the waking world. 

As an introductory literature course, this class will focus on the practices of critical close-reading, analytic writing, and creative-critical interventions as methodology–tools for thinking about and thinking through literature in ways that clarify how we think through issues in our own world, and our positions within it. Literature–a category in which I include films, video games, popular culture, even social media–is not a stand-alone aesthetic object, existing within a vacuum. Rather, it is a cultural artifact that informs (and is informed by) the sociopolitical milieux in which its authors and readers are steeped. The historical, social, political, and cultural context of a work matters deeply; and can, in turn, act as a lens or framework for understanding old things–lost, lorn, and haunted though they may be–in new ways.