Today the Gothic is more than a type of writing featuring Poe's decrepit mansions and medieval dances of the dead; over the twentieth century and especially today the Gothic has become an artistic mode that addresses itself to what one scholar calls "the dark side of culture." The characteristic decrepitude remains but the Gothic has expanded to include non-realistic modes of writing generally, incorporating horror, magical realism, and even fairy tales, most of it somehow addressing to the threat of an archaic or barbarous past to the present. It has always been a mode through which Western writers examined a host of political and cultural anxieties--about race, technological progress, or gender relations for example. After an examination of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Gothic fiction (including Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Henry James) to get our bearings, we’ll look at mostly recent works of Gothic fiction by North American writers. They include Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Mexican Gothic (2021); Randall Kenan, Let The Dead Bury Their Dead (1993) and Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing (2018); and Eden Robinson, Monkey Beach (2001) and Stephen Graham Jones, The Only Good Indians (2021). These novels feature haunted houses, ghosts, and monsters; they also show how women and minority writers have redefined the Gothic and its capacities for doing cultural work in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

[Tentative]: This is a Writing Intensive course; we'll spend time both in and out of class working on writing through generating ideas, producing drafts, peer review, to final drafts. Activities include discussion boards, one brief and three medium-length critical analysis papers, and one final, longer, summative paper.