Genres: American Gothic

From its beginnings in the late 18th century to the present, American fiction has found the gothic to be a particularly apt medium with which to engage with American life. From its proto-Romantic origins, the gothic has explored the ‘dark side’ of the Enlightenment: the repressed desires that lie beneath the rational, and the bitter truths of the unresolved past that notions of progress seek to elide. In an American context, this has meant exploring the American nation and subject, supposedly based in ‘rational revolution’ but often guided by darker impulses—repressed desires and violent impulses--, and the unreconciled past of African enslavement and Native dispossession that perpetually haunts the American present. The gothic also emerges in other American contexts, including the domestic sphere, where the American home threatens to become the haunted space of women’s captivity and oppression.

Possible authors include: Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton, William Faulkner, Shirley Jackson, Jesmyn Ward, and Carmen Maria Machado.

Writing Assignments: multiple short essays in different modes (analytic, reflective, creative, etc.) and final revision/expansion of one of the shorter essays.